Over the past few years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. This paper argues that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and endeavors to provide an impression of this new, and challenging, development. We study data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to better understand (i) t...

This paper develops and estimates a simple on-the-job search model with skills accumulation. In our model, contrary to previous works, skills are not fully firm-specific nor general but partially transferable. When a worker experience a job transition from firm A to firmB a fraction τ of the skills are lost where τ depends on some distance between firm A and B. In this framework the interaction...

We use experimental data from a résumé audit to estimate the impact of particular college majors and internship experience on employment prospects. Despite applying exclusively to business-related job openings, we find no evidence that business degrees improve employment prospects. By contrast, internship experience increases the interview rate by 14 percent. The returns to internship experienc...

This paper argues that the Phillips curve–wage curve controversy cannot be settled within the conventional testing frameworks and suggests an alternative test, which builds on the model of Blanchard and Katz (1997). Using long macro data for the OECD countries, the evidence gives very strong support for the Phillips curve and indicates that wage behaviour is no different among the OECD countrie...

The impact of a stronger work requirement for welfare recipients in a workfare program is studied in an efficiency wage model where a representative firm chooses its level of monitoring activities. A stricter workfare policy raises employment and monitoring activities. It typically increases profits and reduces the tax rate. The impact on the net wage is ambiguous. Utility levels of employed wo...

Wage determination under asymmetric information generates ine¢ ciencies due to excess turnover. Layo¤ taxes can improve e¢ ciency. We show that ine¢ cient separations can even be fully removed with …xed separation taxes in the case where the relevant private information is exponentially distributed. With search frictions, such policies a¤ect the fallback option of labor market participants, hen...

We consider the resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) with precedence. All resources are renewable and the objective is to find a schedule that meets all resource and precedence constraints and minimizes the makespan. We propose a heuristic deterministic greedy algorithm solving this problem with the time complexity depending on the number of activities as n log n. The main id...

We study the long-term effect of becoming a refugee on employment, income and later mobility. After the World War II, Finland ceded a tenth of its land area to the Soviet Union. The entire population in the ceded areas were settled into the remaining parts of the country. Using individual-level panel data, we find that forced migration increased longterm income. The effect is strongest among me...

This paper provides evidence on job flows and worker flows at the level of the employer. We ask whether firms grow by increasing hires, reducing separations, or both, and we develop a graphical approach to address this. We use a new dataset to estimate the relationship between job flows and worker flows at the employer level. We show that most employers are simultaneously hiring and facing sepa...

The control of drug activity currently favors supply-side policies: drug suppliers in the U.S. face a higher arrest rate and longer sentences than demanders. We construct a simple model of drug activity with search and entry frictions in labor and drug markets. Our calibration analysis suggests a strong "dealer replacement effect." As a result, given a variety of community objectives, it is ben...