No abstract

1 We are very grateful to Manuel Arellano for much helpful advice. We wish to thank Brian Bell for supplying us with the CEP-OECD Data Set and Steve Bond for help with DPD98. A preliminary version of this paper was circulated and presented at the MIT International Economics Seminar in March 1995, while Saint-Paul was visiting the MIT Economics Department. We are grateful to participants at that workshop and to those at CREST, the Madrid Macroeconomics Workshop (MadMac), Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Université de Toulouse for their helpful comments. AbstractIn this paper we study the evolution of the labor share in the OECD since 1970. We show it is essentially related to the capital-output ratio; that this relationship is shifted by factors like the price of imported materials or the skill mix; and that discrepancies between the marginal product of labor and the real wage (due to, e.g., product market power, union bargaining, and labor adjustment costs) cause departures from it. We provide estimates of the model with panel data on 14 industries and 14 countries for 1973-93 and use them to compute the evolution of the wage gap in Germany and the US.Jel classification. E25, J30.

No abstract

Social contacts help to find jobs, but not necessarily in the occupations where workers are most productive. Hence social contacts can generate mismatch between workers' occupational choices and their productive advantage. Accordingly, social networks can lead to low labour force quality, low returns to firms' investment and depressed aggregate productivity. We analyse surveys from both the US and Europe including information on job finding through contacts. Consistent with our predictions, contacts reduce unemployment duration by 1-3 months on average, but they are associated with wage discounts of at least 2.5%. We also find some evidence of negative externalities on aggregate productivity. Copyright (c) The London School of Economics and Political Science 2008.

France and Spain have similar labour market institutions and their unemployment rates were both around 8% just before the Great Recession but subsequently that rate has increased to 10% in France and to 23% in Spain. In this article, we assess the part of this differential that is due to the larger gap between the firing costs of permanent and temporary contracts, and the laxer rules on the use of the latter in Spain. A calibrated search and matching model indicates that Spain could have avoided about 45% of its unemployment surge had it adopted the French employment protection legislation.

No abstract

In this paper we study the effects of unemployment benefit duration and the business cycle on unemployment duration. We construct durations for individuals entering unemployment from a longitudinal sample of Spanish men in 1987–94. Estimated discrete hazard models indicate that receipt of unemployment benefits significantly reduces the hazard of leaving unemployment. At durations of three months, when the largest effects occur, the hazard for workers without benefits is twice as large as that for workers with benefits. Favourable business conditions increase the hazard of leaving unemployment. At sample‐period magnitudes, this effect is significantly smaller than that of benefit receipt.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We use a unique dataset to estimate the impact of a large credit supply shock on employment in Spain. We exploit marked differences in banks' health at the onset of the Great Recession. Several weak banks were rescued by the State and they reduced credit more than other banks. We compare employment changes from 2006 to 2010 at firms heavily indebted to weak banks before the crisis and the rest. Our estimates imply that these firms suffered an additional employment drop between 3 and 13.5 percentage points due to weak-bank attachment, representing between 8% and 36% of aggregate job losses. JEL-Code: D920, G330, J230. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may