The Use of Flexible Measures to Cope with Economic Crises in Germany and Brazil This study gives a comparative overview of labor market dynamics and institutional arrangements in Germany and Brazil with particular emphasis on industrial relations, wage setting, unemployment benefits, employment protection and vocational training. The paper shows that institutions determine the mode of adjustmen...

This paper studies the effect of cultural attitudes on childcare provision, fertility, female labour force participation and the gender wage gap. Cross-country data show that fertility, female labour force participation and childcare are positively correlated with each other, while the wage gap seems to be negatively correlated with these variables. The paper presents a model with endogenous fe...

Jobs offer different wages and different non-monetary working conditions. This paper investigates how the demand for non-monetary aspects evolves over changing wealth levels. Wages do not perfectly compensate individuals for differential utility of jobs in a labour market with informational frictions. Changes in wealth may then affect preferences for different jobs. Willingness to pay for non-m...

This paper evaluates the effects of a fall in payroll taxes on employment and wages in the presence of high labor informality. For that purpose, the paper examines a recently approved tax reform in Colombia especially targeted to promote labor formality. The model suggests that the reform would increase total employment by between 0.3 to 0.5 percent and formal employment by between 3.4 to 3.7 p...

Worker Absenteeism in Search Equilibrium The paper presents a general equilibrium model of search unemployment that incorporates absence from work as a distinct labor force state. Absenteeism is driven by random shocks to the value of leisure that are private information to the workers. Firms maximize profits while recognizing that the compensation package may affect the queue of job applicants...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be equalized across sectors, predicts that immigration...

This paper provides detailed information about spatial interactions in the job creation process in West German regional labor markets. We investigate spatial (auto-) correlations in the matching process of vacancies and unemployed, examine regional hiring patterns, and identify clusters of regions with intense inter-regional matching. An extensive specification analysis illustrates the extent o...

The world’s biggest and arguably most aggressive form of employment based affirmative action policy for minorities exists in India. This paper exploits the institutional features of federally mandated employment quota policy to examine its effect on labor market outcomes of two distinct minority groups. My main finding is that a 1-percent increase in employment quota significantly increases the...

Using estimates of earnings functions in Ghana, this paper examines patterns of labor market segmentation with regard to formal and informal employment. Persistent earnings differentials are used as indicators of limited mobility across segments of the employed labor force. We find evidence of labor market segmentation between formal and informal employment and between different categories of i...

Regional Dependencies in Job Creation: An Efficiency Analysis for Western Germany This paper investigates the efficiency of the matching process between job seekers and vacancy posting firms in West-Germany, using variation across labor market regions and across time. The results of a stochastic frontier analysis shed new light on extent and regional differences of search frictions, on potentia...