Using a longitudinal matched employer-employee data set for Portugal over the [1986][1987][1988][1989][1990][1991][1992][1993][1994][1995][1996][1997][1998][1999][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004][2005] period, this study analyzes the heterogeneity in wages responses to aggregate labor market conditions for newly hired workers and existing workers. Controlling simultaneously for worker and firm specific effects, the results show that entry wages are much more procyclical than current wages. A one-point increase in the unemployment rate decreases wages of newly hired male workers by around 2.5% and by just 1.5% for workers in continuing jobs. For female workers these same effects are 2.3% and 1.1%, respectively. Thus, our empirical evidence does not seem to lend support to the hypothesis of wage stickiness as an explanation for the unemployment volatility puzzle.JEL classification: D21; E24; E32; J31 Keywords: wage cyclicality; hires; fim-specific effects * We thank Lucena Vieira for excellent computational assistance and Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia for financial support (research grant POCTI/ECO/35147/99). The data used in this article are confidential but the authors' access is not exclusive.

The papers and commentaries presented at the conference addressed many important issues related to the functioning of the euro area. Our hope is that these contributions will help improve understanding of the nature of Europe's monetary union, the underpinnings of its crisis, and the changes that are needed so that crises will be prevented in the future. The papers examined two main sets of issues. One group of papers, adopting a union-wide perspective, assessed the aspects of the euro area's institutional architecture that, with the benefit of hindsight, may have contributed to the crisis, and the policy responses to the crisis at the union level. A second group of papers focused on developments in three crisis countries-Greece, Ireland, and Portugal.

It remains a question whether serial entrepreneurs typically perform better than their novice counterparts owing to learning by doing e¤ects or mostly because they are a selected sample of higher-than-average ability entrepreneurs. This paper tries to unravel these two e¤ects by exploring a novel empirical strategy based on continuous time duration models with selection. We use a large longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset that allows us to track almost 220,000 individuals who have left their …rst entrepreneurial experience. Over 35,000 serial entrepreneurs are identi…ed and followed in their second business, in order to evaluate how entrepreneurial experience acquired in the previous business improves persistence by reducing their exit rates. Our results show that serial entrepreneurs are not a random selection of ex-business-owners. The positive association found between prior experience and serial entrepreneurs'survival is mainly due to selection on ability, rather than the result of learning by doing.