T he labor market is replete with imperfect and asymmetric information. Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous, and the quality of their interaction when paired is notoriously difficult to forecast. Workers searching for a job are unlikely to be fully informed about job characteristics, and firms cannot exhaustively screen and negotiate with all applicants. Electronic commerce specificall...

\Western Europe su®ers from too many labor market rigidities, from excessively generous unemployment insurance to high employment protection, and to high minimum wages. It is essential that countries putting in place new institutions do not commit the same mistakes." The quote is made up. But it is, I believe, a fair representation of the opinions of many experts and many organizations, from Th...

and the conference participants for valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. We are responsible for all remaining errors.

The German Labor Market: Still Adjusting Badly? In the late nineties, Germany was often seen as a laggard with respect to labor market and welfare state reforms with institutional inertia being reflected in notoriously sluggish employment growth and rising unemployment. Recent years, however, saw a complex sequence of reforms with regard to labor market-related institutions such as labor market...

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...

The study of labor market segmentation and the estimation of the deadweight loss due to policy distortions reflected in wage structures require analyses of labor force surveys. These data are increasingly available in most countries. But evaluations of labor market reforms are uncommon. The lack of documented labor market reforms may reflect the difficulty of reducing wage distortions by direct...

Market Imperfections and Firm-Sponsored Training Recent human capital theories predict that labor market frictions and product market competition influence firm-sponsored training. Using matched worker-firm data from Dutch manufacturing, our paper empirically assesses the validity of these predictions. We find that a decrease in labor market frictions significantly reduces firms’ training expen...

Labour market reforms face very often opposition from the employed workers, because it normally reduces their wages. Also product market regulations are regularly biased towards too much benefitting the firms. As a result there remain many frictions in both the labour and product markets that hinder an optimal functioning of the economy. These issues have recently received a lot of attention in...

I study the interactions of product and labor market institutions in a model characterized by a three-states representation of the labor market. Firms bargain with unions over wages and employment levels. This generates unemployment. Households take the associated unemployment risk as given in making their participation decisions. Unemployment inserts a wedge between labor supply (participation...