What Do Labor Market Institutions Do? The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in research on various labor market institutions. This paper offers a brief overview and discussion of research on the labor market impacts of minimum wages (MW), unemployment insurance (UI), and employment protection legislation (EPL). It is argued that research on UI is largely a success story, involvin...

In an equilibrium model of the labor market, workers and firms enter into dynamic contracts that can potentially last forever, but are subject to optimal terminations. Upon termination, the firm hires a new worker, and the worker who is terminated receives a termination contract from the firm and is then free to go back to the labor market to seek new employment opportunities and enter into new...

The Role of Borders, Languages, and Currencies as Obstacles to Labor Market Integration* Based on a modified Spatiotemporal Autoregressive Model (STAR), we analyze whether borders still constitute significant impediments to labor market integration in the European Union, despite the formal law of free movement of labor. Using regional data from the EU-15 countries over 21 years, we find that th...

We study the role of agency frictions and costly external finance in cyclical labor market dynamics, with a focus on how credit-market frictions may amplify aggregate TFP shocks. The main result is that aggregate TFP shocks lead to large fluctuations of labor market quantities if the model is calibrated to the empirically observed countercyclicality of the finance premium. A financial accelerat...

Within an open economy framework characterized by vertical linkages in production, and search frictions with two-sided heterogeneity the labor market, raising trade barriers is shown to increase unemployment across skill levels reduce market participation aggregate income. These effects are not necessarily moderated maintaining frictionless mobility of capital borders. We find that a flexicurit...

Credit Market Constraints and Labor Market Decisions In this paper, we examine whether imperfections in credit markets spill over to other markets, particularly the labor market. We take the case of Italy, a country that experienced changes in the mortgage market brought about by the 1992 European unification and other institutional shifts. These events make Italy a good laboratory to study the...

Macroeconomic Volatilities and the Labor Market: First Results from the Euro Experiment This paper analyzes the effects of different labor market institutions on inflation and output volatility. The eurozone offers an unprecedented experiment for this exercise: since 1999, no national monetary policies have been implemented that could account for volatility differences across member states, but...

The study of labor flows across labor markets is a central ingredient in any discussion of labor market equilibrium. These labor flows help markets reach a more efficient allocation of resources. This paper surveys the economic analysis of immigration. It investigates the determinants of the immigration decision by workers in source countries and the impact of that decision on the host country'...