Wages,selectivity, and vacancies: Evaluating the short-term and long-term impact of the minimum wage on unemployment

Using a circular matching model (Marimon R, Zilibotti F. Unemployment vs. mismatch of talents: Reconsidering unemployment benefits. Economic Journal 1999;109; 266–291), where the wage setting is similar to Weiss (Weiss A. Job queues and layoffs in labor markets with flexible wages. Journal of Political Economy 1980; 88; 526–538), we reexamine Card and Krueger's (Card, D., Krueger, A. Myth and Measurement, the New Economics of the Minimum Wage. Princeton University Press; 1995) intuition on the impact of the minimum wage on unemployment. In the short term, a rise in the minimum wage increases the employment level by making firms less selective. In the long term, numerical simulations show that, despite the reduction of job creation, introducing a minimum wage may lower unemployment as soon as workers and jobs are sufficiently differentiated. However, beyond some limit, the wage increase raises unemployment whatever the degree of differentiation is.     

Labor market cycles, unemployment insurance eligibility, and moral hazard

If entitlement to UI benefits must be earned with employment, generous UI is an additional benefit to working, so, by itself, it promotes job creation. If individuals are risk neutral, then there is a UI contribution scheme that eliminates any effect of UI on employment decisions. As with Ricardian Equivalence, this result should be useful to pinpoint the effects of UI to violations of its premises. Our baseline simulation shows that if the neutral contribution scheme derived in this paper were to be implemented, the average unemployment rate in the United States would fall from 5.7 to 4.7 percent. Also, the results show that with endogenous UI eligibility, one can simultaneously generate realistic productivity driven cycles and realistic responses of unemployment to changes in UI benefits.     

Unemployment dynamics with international capital mobility

We study the response of domestic unemployment rates to shocks in total factor productivity for economies with high capital mobility and low labour mobility. We show that high capital mobility amplifies the impact on the domestic unemployment rate of domestic fluctuations in total factor productivity, shortens the lag of the response to shocks and raises the variability of unemployment. But average unemployment is unaffected. Capital flows increase the riskiness of labour income and reduce the riskiness of capital income but do not reduce mean welfare.     

Unemployment Durations in West Germany Before and After the Reform of the Unemployment Compensation System during the 1980s

Abstract. This paper analyzes empirically the distribution of unemployment durations in West Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. It therefore covers periods before and after the changes during the mid‐1980s in the maximum entitlement periods for unemployment benefits for older unemployed. The analysis is based on the IAB employment subsample containing administrative data for about 500,000 individuals. Since these data only partly reveal the unemployment duration in an economic sense, we use a narrow and a wide proxy for unemployment. Our empirical analysis finds significant changes in the distribution of non‐employment durations for older unemployed. At the same time, the distribution of unemployment durations between jobs remained unchanged after the reforms. Our findings clearly show that many firms and workers used the more beneficial laws as a part of early retirement packages. Surprisingly, for those workers who found and accepted a new job, we do not observe a prolongation of their search periods to a sizeable extent.     

Unemployment insurance with hidden savings

This paper studies the design of unemployment insurance when neither the searching effort nor the savings of an unemployed agent can be monitored. If the principal could monitor the savings, the optimal policy would leave the agent savings-constrained. With a constant absolute risk-aversion (CARA) utility function, we obtain a closed form solution of the optimal contract. Under the optimal contract, the agent is neither saving nor borrowing constrained. Counter-intuitively, his consumption declines faster than implied by Hopenhayn and Nicolini (1997) [1]. The efficient allocation can be implemented by an increasing benefit during unemployment and a constant tax during employment.     

A note on the life-cycle search and matching model with segmented labor markets

Recently, there has been renewed interest in labor search and matching models that incorporate a life-cycle structure by assuming finite horizons. Existing studies provide detailed analyses on the age dynamics of job creation and destruction, assuming that workers of all ages search for jobs in the same market. This paper examines a related environment that has drawn less attention, where the labor market is exogenously segmented by age. The paper finds sufficient conditions for the model to yield unambiguous predictions on the age profiles of key variables, and compares them with the corresponding conditions in models with a single market. The paper further examines the age profiles of these key variables in the efficient allocation. In particular, with no persistence in idiosyncratic match productivity, the efficient allocation is found to exhibit monotonic age profiles for the job finding and separation rates.     

Unemployment and indeterminacy

Using an efficiency-wage model, we examine the relationship between indeterminacy and unemployment insurance. It is shown that the less unemployment insurance is, the more likely equilibrium is to be indeterminate. Equilibrium can be indeterminate even without externalities or increasing returns, which makes a sharp contrast to the recent literature on indeterminacy. Our result is based on the fact that the no-shirking condition with marginal utility of wealth kept constant is downward sloping when income insurance is not perfect.     

Endogenous job specialization

According to some authors, technical change contributes to the explanation of the increase in equilibrium unemployment by making jobs more and more specialized. Here, we assume that firms optimally adapt the specialization of jobs to overall labour market conditions. Using a matching labour market framework, we show that the increase in unemployment can explain the higher specialization of jobs.     

The low skill trap

Recently, it has become popular to argue that certain workers have fallen into a trap in which they have poor skills, few job opportunities and a low return on training, while others have not. This paper demonstrates how such a trap can occur within a simple matching model with rent sharing. Rent sharing diminishes the worker's incentive to acquire skills; however, since firms also benefit from training, rent sharing likewise induces job creation. The subsequent improved matching prospects may offset the initial disincentive to invest. However, for this mechanism to be effective, firms and workers must coordinate their actions. If they do not, the trap occurs.     

Micro and macro elasticities in a life cycle model with taxes

We build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work. We find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of work. Moreover, we find that there is no inconsistency between this result and the empirical finding of small labor elasticities for prime age workers. In our model, micro and macro elasticities are effectively unrelated. Our model is also consistent with other cross-country patterns.     

Efficiency in a search and matching model with training costs

This paper studies the efficiency of the search and matching model with training costs. I incorporate productivity enhancing firm-specific skill training into the search and matching model of Pissarides (2000). I demonstrate that while the decentralized economy can be efficient if training costs are not sunk at the time of wage determination, the decentralized economy is not efficient due to a hold-up problem if training costs are sunk.     

Assessing the reassessment: A panel analysis of the Lisbon Strategy

We assess the employment impact of the Lisbon Strategy, examining long-run growth in total, female and old-age employment rates from 1994 to 2009. The Strategy had some impact, especially for old-age workers, but no improvement ensued from its mid-term reassessment.     

A three state model of worker flows in general equilibrium

We develop a simple model featuring search frictions and a nondegenerate labor supply decision along the extensive margin. The model is a standard version of the neoclassical growth model with indivisible labor and idiosyncratic productivity shocks and frictions characterized by employment loss and employment opportunity arrival shocks. We argue that it is able to account for the key features of observed labor market flows for reasonable parameter values. Persistent idiosyncratic productivity shocks play a key role in allowing the model to match the persistence of the employment and out of the labor force states found in individual labor market histories.     

Island matching

A plausible micro foundation for the matching function, postulated in models of equilibrium unemployment, is proposed. The flow of matches formed is an increasing and concave function of the number of jobs and workers to be matched holding the other constant, but exhibits increasing to scale. Nevertheless, the function is consistent with the observed Beveridge curve and the log linear relationship between the job finding rate and the vacancy-unemployment ratio. Although a market equilibrium in which wages are determined by ex post auctions is not constrained efficient, a modified auction exists that decentralizes the solution to the social planner's problem.     

Are Good Industrial Relations Good for the Economy?

Abstract. Recent US microeconomic analysis indicates that good industrial relations might improve firm performance. Of late, it has also been claimed that the benefits of industrial relations quality – proxied inversely by a strikes variable – could also extend to the macroeconomy. Using cross-country data, we find that, independent of other labor market institutions, a lower strike volume is associated with lower unemployment. Although there is a separate line of causation running from unemployment to strikes, our analysis suggests that this is not dominant. That said, support for the notion that macro performance owes something to good industrial relations is, however, weakened once we formally control for strike endogeneity.     

Do search frictions matter for inflation dynamics?

We assess the empirical relevance for inflation dynamics of accounting for the presence of search frictions in the labor market. The new Keynesian Phillips curve explains inflation as being mainly driven by current and expected future marginal costs. Recent empirical research has emphasized different measures of real marginal costs to be consistent with observed inflation persistence. We argue that, allowing for search frictions in the labor market, real marginal cost should also incorporate the cost of generating and maintaining long-term employment relationships, along with conventional measures, such as real unit labor costs. In order to construct a synthetic measure of real marginal costs, we use newly available labor market data on worker finding and separation rates that reflect hiring and firing costs. We then estimate a new Keynesian Phillips curve by generalized method of moments (GMM) using the imputed marginal cost series as an observable and find that the contribution of labor market frictions in explaining inflation dynamics is small.     

Block recursive equilibria for stochastic models of search on the job

We develop a general stochastic model of directed search on the job. Directed search allows us to focus on a Block Recursive Equilibrium (BRE) where agents' value functions, policy functions and market tightness do not depend on the distribution of workers over wages and unemployment. We formally prove existence of a BRE under various specifications of workers' preferences and contractual environments, including dynamic contracts and fixed-wage contracts. Solving a BRE is as easy as solving a representative agent model, in contrast to the analytical and computational difficulties in models of random search on the job.