We consider a dynamic macroeconomic model with households that regard relative affluence as social status. The measure of relative affluence can be the ratio to, or the difference from, the social average. The two specifications lead to quite different results: with the ratio specification full employment is necessarily realized, whereas with the difference specification persistent shortages of...

This paper develops an equilibrium search model to explain gender asymmetry in occupational distribution. Workers’ utility depends on salary and working hours, and women have a greater aversion to market hours than men. Simulations indicate that women crowd into shorter-hour, lower-paying jobs than men. If employers discriminate against women, offers are tailored more toward men’s preferences; ...

We consider a Rothschild-Stiglitz-Spence labour market model and employ a centralised mechanism to coordinate the efficient matching of workers to firms. This mechanism can be thought of as operated by a recruitment agency, an employment office or head hunter. In a centralised descending-bid, multi-item procurement auction, workers submit wage-bids for each job and are assigned stable jobs as e...

We show that equilibrium involuntary unemployment emerges in a multi– stage game model where all market power resides with firms, on both the labour and the output market. Firms decide wages, employment, output and prices, and under constant returns there exists a continuum of subgame perfect Nash equilibria involving unemployment and positive profits. A firm does not undercut the equilibrium w...

Why Are European Countries Diverging in Their Unemployment Experience? During the nineties, unemployment has fallen in a number of European countries while it has remained high in others. The paper discusses potential causes for that evolution in light of recent economic research, emphasizing obstacles to reform due to political constraints, the prevalence of ideology, and agency issues within ...

This paper addresses the large degree of frictional wage dispersion in US data. The standard job matching model without on-the-job search cannot replicate this pattern. With on-the-job search, however, unemployed job searchers are more willing to accept low wage offers since they can continue to seek for better employment opportunities. This explains why observably identical workers may be paid...

Can Active Labor Market Policy Be Counter-Productive? We study active labor market policies (ALMP) in a matching model. ALMPs are modelled as a subsidy to job search. Workers differ in their productivity, and search takes place along an extensive margin. An additional job seeker affects the quality of unemployed workers. As a result, the Hosios conditions are no longer valid. To replicate the o...

Opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers in the UK diverged over the last quarter of the twentieth century. We develop an empirical framework consistent with these trends that highlights the importance of skill heterogeneity in both wage setting and labour demand in explaining aggregate labour market outcomes. The framework enables us to quantify the macroeconomic effects of shocks that ...

We consider a model of a sector in which the same set of oligopolistic firms faces a common labour supply constraint. The wage is given in the short run, adjusting competitively in the longer run. When the costs of job creation are low relative to the degree of output market power, there exists no wage that clears the labour market in the short run, and at some wages there are two equilibria, o...

We use the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) 2003-2012 to estimate time spent in non-work on the job. Non-work is substantial and varies positively with local unemployment. Time spent in non-work conditional on any positive amount rises, while the fraction of workers reporting positive values declines with unemployment. Both effects are economically important, and are consistent with a model in w...