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...

Using a newly constructed panel of manufacturing industry data for interwar Norway, we estimate a long-run wage curve for the 1930s that has all the modern features of being homogeneous in prices, proportional to productivity, and having an unemployment elasticity of −0.1. This result is more typical of contemporary European than U.S. wage equations, even if the labour market in interwar Norway...

There exists no consensus regarding the definition and the measure of persistence. We aim to spark research interests to address the lack of a standard definition. This paper reviews this issue and proposes an informal definition to unemployment persistence. JEL CLASSIFICATION: B41, E24. ∗Department of Economics, College of Business Administration, University of Central Florida. E-mail: omikhai...

We show that labor search frictions are an important determinant of the cross-section of equity returns. In the data, sorting firms by loadings on labor market tightness, the key statistic of search models, generates a spread in future returns of 6% annually. We propose a partial equilibrium labor market model in which heterogeneous firms make optimal employment decisions under labor search fri...

We utilise repeated cross sections of micro data from several countries, available from the Luxembourg Income Study, LIS, to estimate labour supply elasticities, both at the intensive and extensive margin. The benefit of the data is that it spans over four decades and includes a large number of tax reform episodes, with tax rate variation arising both from cross-sectional and country-level diff...

We investigate experimentally the economic effects of wage taxation to finance unemployment benefits for a closed economy and an international economy. The main findings are the following. (i) There is clear evidence of a vicious circle in the dynamic interaction between the wage tax and unemployment. (ii) In the short run employment is boosted by budget deficits. However, subsequent tax rate a...

In an overlapping generations model with Cournot competition on the goods market it is shown that a continuum of stationary states and perfect foresight trajectories exists with unemployment at arbitrary low wages. Decisive for this is the influence that different forecast functions have on the objective demand curve, even though they are consistent with perfect foresight. With an example it is...

Following an analysis of the relation between a standard Steindlian model of stagnation and Steindl’s own analysis, we modify the standard model by introducing endogenous changes in the markup and a reformulation of the investment function. These extensions, which address significant weaknesses of the standard model, find support in Steindl’s writing and leave intact some of Steindl’s key resul...

An increase in unemployment compensation is commonly argued to raise unemployment in a shirking model of efficiency wages. This prediction is based on the assumption of a uniform benefit level. However, 32q13if differential benefits for shirkers and non-shirkers exist, higher unemployment compensation for non-shirkers will reduce unemployment. In the long-run, this effect is amplified. Therefor...