Flexibility vs. Rigidity: Does Spain have the worst of both Worlds? In this paper we study the structure of labor market flows in Spain and compare them with France and the US. We characterize a number of empirical regularities and stylized facts. One striking result is that the job finding rate is slightly higher than in France, while the jon loss rate is much higher, putting Spain half-way be...

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act (PRWORA) institutes a maximum sixty-month “life-time” benefit window for TANF block-grant recipients, involving TANF beneficiaries actually finding paid employment somewhere in the extant labor force. We believe that this welfare-to-work transition constitutes the most important element of the welfare reform initiative among states in the U.S. because it reflects the...

This paper develops and quantifies the implications of the stock-flow matching model for unemployment, job vacancies, and worker flows. Workers and jobs are heterogeneous, so most worker-job pairs cannot profitably match, leading to the coexistence of unemployed workers and job vacancies. Productivity shocks cause fluctuations in the number of active jobs, which in turn cause fluctuations in la...

Economic institutions structure links between labor-market informality and social stratification. The present study explores how periods of institutional change and post-socialist market transition alter network-based job finding, in particular informal recruitment. We highlight how market transitions affect both the prevalence and distribution of network-based recruitment channels: open-market...

The supply behavior of labor frequently depends on the demand conditions that prevail on the labor market. If demand is inadequate, households may send additional household members, who otherwise would not have worked, to look for work, for fear that the main income earner may lose his job. This paper is a study of the theoretical consequences of this ’’added worker’’ affect. It is shown that t...