Outsourcing has been increasing in recent years as more firms in the developed countries have decided to outsource part of their production activities to their subsidiaries or local firms in the developing countries. Outsourcing either reduces a firm’s cost of labor or gives a firm better access to the local market so as to gain a larger market share. This rise in outsourcing activities has cre...

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) is a new data source of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that estimates monthly vacancies, hires, and separations. It has quickly become a useful tool for studying the labor market. This chapter summarizes its aggregate and micro-level evidence, including the relations of vacancies and worker flows to unemployment and other measures of labor mark...

The paper studies the employment effects of a deposit-refund scheme on labor in a simple search-theoretic model of the labor market. It is shown that if a firm pays a deposit when it fires a worker, to be refunded when it employs the same or another worker, the vacancy rate increases and the unemployment rate declines. The scheme introduces rigidities in the labor market, however, which may be ...

Raising children demands a considerable amount of parental time, obliging working parents either to further reduce their leisure or to buy child-care services in the market. Parents may face additional opportunity costs upon deciding to participate in the labor market, but these are difficult to measure. Using a survey instrument in Belgium and Germany, we estimate the income compensation neede...

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...

The welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product and labor markets in the United States is quantified in a dynamic general equilibrium model. We find that the welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product market is 3.62 percent while it is 0.58 percent in the labor market, taking the transition path from the distorted to the optimal steady state into account. If we also take into...

In the recent years, an economic crisis has appeared in most economies. It affected the labor market situation. This article refers to the changes in the labor markets of the Visegrad Group countries. The analysis concerns the relations between the economic crisis, the level and structure of unemployment (taking into account the situation of women and young people as the groups strongly exposed...

Since 1997, states have begun to make criminal history records publicly available over the Internet. This paper exploits this previously unexamined variation to identify the effect of expanded employer access to criminal history data on the labor market outcomes of ex-offenders and non-offenders. Employers express a strong aversion to hiring ex-offenders, but there is likely asymmetric informat...

I investigate the role that matching frictions play in the Puerto Rican labor market. The search-theoretical models of the labor market which were developed in the 1980’s led to an explosion of empirical work in the search for evidence of the mechanisms that supported the theory. This paper seeks to measure the degree to which the Puerto Rican labor market is afflicted by congestion externaliti...

Are couples who have been together longer more likely to stick together in the face of adversity? This paper uses monthly data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to investigate the impact on relationship duration of labor market shocks such as layoff, discharge for cause, and disability. Using a Cox proportional hazard model, I show that generally these labor market shocks sign...