It is shown that differences in beliefs can be an important source of inequality even if everyone is equally productive and people are reasonably sophisticated in the way that they learn about their economic environment. As is standard in the search literature, people believe that the wage offers they obtain while searching for a job are drawn from a stationary distribution. They then base thei...

this study examins effects of trade liberalization on the wage inequality across industries and between genders within these industries by utilizing the data of micro-level households’ income and expenditures surveys and trade statistics over 2001-2011. the analysis is carried based on the heckscher–ohlin’s theory in international trade and baker’s taste discrimination theory at firms. we use q...

This paper develops a labour market model with on-the-job search, match-specific productivity draws and an endogenous irreversible schooling decision. The choice of schooling is modeled as an optimal stopping problem which gives rise to the equilibrium heterogeneity of workers with respect to the formal education. The optimal schooling decision is characterized by the reservation productivity o...

There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labor force, and the potential policy responses. This paper uses a bi-national survey on immigrant performance to investigate the sorting of individuals into full-time paid-employment and entrepreneurship and their economic success. Particular attention is paid to the role of legal status at entry in the host country (worker, refugee,...

In this paper we consider learning from search as a mechanism to understand the relationship between unemployment duration and search outcomes as a labor market equilibrium. We rely on the assumption that workers do not have precise knowledge of their job finding probabilities and therefore, learn about them from their search histories. Embedding this assumption in a model of the labor market w...

In this article we explain the essential role of controlled experiments in testing job-search models. We derive the testable implications of a finite-horizon job-search model and layout the design of the controlled experiments that we use to test those implications. We present the results of several parametric and nonparametric tests, all conditional on the actual draws of the wage offers. Over...

In this paper we show the existence of a negative relationship between long run growth and labor market imperfections both theoretically and empirically. We consider a “monopolistic union” imperfect labor market in a neoclassical growth framework and show that labor market rigidity, captured by the mark-up over the reservation wage, does lower the growth rate along the transitional path. We ver...

In many contracting settings, actions costly to one party but with no direct benefits to the other (money-burning) may be part of the explicit or implicit contract. A leading example is bureaucratic procedures in an employer-employee relationship. We study a model of delegation with an informed agent, where the principal may impose money-burning on the agent as a function of the agent’s choice ...

Unemployment in South Africa is so widespread that it demands an explanation. This paper examines two questions about South African unemployment. Firstly, why do the unemployed not enter the informal sector, as is common in other developing countries? Secondly, why do the unemployed not enter wage employment more readily? The findings provide little support for the idea that unemployed people c...

This paper considers an equilibrium search model, where firms use information on a worker’s labour market status when recruiting new hires, and all workers search for a job. We show that firms segment their workforce in two. Unemployed workers are offered a lower wage than the workers they recruit from employment in a competing firm even when these workers have the same productivity. The unique...