This paper extends the now familiar Shapiro-Stiglitz (1984) model of labor market behavior to reconsider the controversial proposition that some forms of innovation have persistent displacement e ects. In particular, it nds that when distinctions between random production failures and reduced e ort level are di cult to draw, the adoption of new methods of production that compel more e ort, brea...

We propose a new business cycle theory. Firms need to randomize over firing or keeping workers who have performed poorly in the past, in order to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Firms have an incentive to coordinate the outcome of their randomizations, as coordination allows them to load the firing probability on states of the world in which it is costlier for workers to become ...

Search Frictions on Product and Labor Markets: Money in the Matching Function This paper builds a macroeconomic model of equilibrium unemployment in which firms persistently face difficulties in selling their production and this affects their decisions to create jobs. Due to search-frictions on the product market, equilibrium unemployment is a U-shaped function of the ratio of total demand to t...

This paper aims at explaining the dynamics of labor markets in Spain, especially the high persistence of unemployment and the Beveridge curve. We build a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium matching model, which assumes failures in the matching between vacancies and unemployed. We calibrate the model for the Spanish economy and simulate it considering two sources of exogenous shocks: a techn...

We analyze how the financial conditions of the firm affect the compensation structure of workers, the size of the firm, and its dynamics. Firms that are financially constrained offer long-term wage contracts characterized by an increasing wage profile, that is, they pay lower wages today in exchange of higher future wages, effectively borrowing from their employees. Because constrained firms al...

The reservation wage is an integral part of most theories of involuntary unemployment. We use panel data to examine the empirical determinants of the reservation wage — in particular the inßuence of previous wages — and consider what this implies for the evolution of the natural rate of unemployment. We Þnd that previous wages have a signiÞcant but relatively small effect on reservation wages (...

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 is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship between aggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive a framework based on individuals’ risks of unemployment and poverty, and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the British Household Panel Survey for 1991-96, we are able to square the micro evidence that unemployment matters for poverty with the mac...

We find that, across OECD countries, there is a strong link between the rate of self employment and the intensity of both productand labor-market regulations. The sensitivity of the self-employment rate to regulation appears greater in terms of statistical significance and magnitude than the sensitivity of unemployment. We then develop a model of rent creation and division featuring product and...

Extensions of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits have been implemented in response to the Great Recession. This paper measures the effect of these extensions on the unemployment rate using a calibrated structural model featuring job search and consumption-saving decisions, skill depreciation, and UI eligibility. The ongoing UI benefit extensions are found to have raised the unemployment rate ...