Labor supply dynamics, unemployment and experience in the labor market

In the last decades, OECD labor markets faced important labor supply changes with the arrival of women and the cohorts of the baby-boom. Using a survey where workers declare their true employment experience, this paper argues that these supply trends imply more inexperienced workers. It then investigates the consequences of this fact on the skill composition of the labor force, between-groups wage inequality and the level of unemployment. The main result is that a labor market with wage rigidities may not recover from such a temporary labor supply shock : with a younger and less experienced labor force, there is higher unemployment among low-experience workers, they do not accumulate enough on-the-job human capital, this reduces in the long-run the supply of skilled (experienced) workers and the demand for unskilled workers. This intertemporal multiplication of supply shocks generates multiple equilibria, and the rigid economy is stuck to the bad equilibrium even after the shock. In a competitive labor market, in contrast, wage inequality and notably, the wage return to expérience becomes higher but there is no persistence of the supply shock.Wage inequality, Education, Experience

Housing Regulation, Statistical Discrimination, and the Recourse to Agencies.

Housing and labor markets exhibit many similarities. First, information is imperfect. Tenant quality, like worker quality, is unobserved. Second, separation is costly and time consuming. The laws and regulation typically complicate or slow down the termination process of the contractual relationship and make it more costly for firms and landlords to fire an employee /evict a tenant. And finally, there are rigidities in nominal wages and rents. Adapting tools from labor theory, we attempt to understand how landlords wish to screen and possibly statistically discriminate against potential tenants. They do so when housing regulations are more stringent. If they have a “taste against discrimination” (the opposite of Becker’s “taste for discrimination”), they are more likely to have recourse to agencies in order to outsource screening. Preliminary descriptive evidence of cross-country differences in housing regulations and housing market functioning is provided.

Equilibrium Search Unemployment with Explicit Spatial Frictions

Assuming that job search efficiency decreases with distance to jobs, workers' location in a city depends on spatial elements such as commuting costs and land prices and on labour elements such as wages and the matching technology. In the absence of moving costs, we show that there exists a unique equilibrium in which employed and unemployed workers are perfectly segregated but move at each employment transition. We investigate the interactions between the land and the labour market equilibrium and show under which condition they are interdependent. When relocation costs become positive, a new zone appears in which both the employed and the unemployed co-exist and are not mobile. We demonstrate that the size of this area goes continuously to zero when moving costs vanish. Finally, we endogeneize search effort, show that it negatively depends on distance to jobs and that long and short-term unemployed workers coexist and locate in different areas of the city.Local Labour Markets; Relocation Costs; Search Effort; Job Matching

Higher Education Levels, Firms' Outside Options and the Wage Structure

We analyze the consequences of an increase in the supply of highly educated workers on relative and real wages in a search model where wages are set by Nash-bargaining. The key insight is that an increase in the supply of highly educated workers improves the firms' outside option. As a consequence, the real wage of all workers decreases in the short-run. Since this decline is more pronounced for less educated workers, wage inequality increases. In the long-run a better educated work force induces firms to invest more in physical capital. Wage inequality and real wages of highly educated workers increase while real wages of less educated workers may decrease. These results are consistent with the U.S. experience in the 70s and 80s. Based upon differences in legal employment protection we also provide an explanation for the diverging evolution of real and relative wages in Continental Europe.Wage Inequality; Matching; Creation Costs; Firing Costs.

Macroeconomics of Credit and Labor Markets Imperfections.

Credit market imperfections influence the labor market and aggregate economic activity. In turn, macroeconomic factors have an impact on the credit sector. To assess these effects in a tractable general-equilibrium framework, we introduce endogenous search frictions, in the spirit of Peter Diamond (1990), in both credit and labor markets. We demonstrate that credit frictions amplify macroeconomic volatility through a financial accelerator. The magnitude of this general-equilibrium accelerator is proportional to the credit gap, defined as the deviation of actual output from its perfect credit market level. We explore various extensions, notably endogenous wages.

Labor Markets with Imperfect Housing Markets. Seventh IZA/SOLE Transatlantic Meeting of Labor Economists, Buch-Ammersee, May 22-25, 2008.

A model is developed that allows for interaction between the labor market and the housing market. A job location has an associated commuting time that may affect the job acceptance decision. Obstacles to mobility, such as regulations in the housing market will affect the reservation strategy of workers. Thus, aggregate unemployment will depend, at least partly, on the functioning of the housing market. Data from the U.S. and E.U. reveals that individuals in the U.S. are about three times more likely to experience a change in residence within a given year. At the same time, unemployment in the E.U. is roughly twice that in the U.S. This paper seeks to understand, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how housing market frictions might affect the functioning of the labor market.

Equilibrium Employment and Labor Markets Imperfections: Matching vs. Participation costs. UQAM-CIRPEE Conference on Labor Market Frictions and Macroeconomic Dynamics, October 3-4 2003.

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Scientific project, Sciences Po | LIEPP laboratoire interdisciplinaire d'evaluation des politiques publiques or in english, interdisciplinary research center for the evaluation of public policies

Sciences Po develops an interdisciplinary research program for the evaluation of public policies (in French: Laboratoire interdisciplinaire d’évaluation des politiques publiques, LIEPP), based on four founding units: Department of Economics, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Centre d’Etudes Européennes and Observatoire Sociologique du Changement. Its aim is to be (1) independent and non-partisan to ensure its credibility, (2) international to learn from experiences in other countries, and finally (3) multidisciplinary in order to achieve thorough and comprehensive knowledge of our environment and its institutional, social, political, legal and economic mechanisms. The project is financed as a through the Excellency Initiative of the French Government (Investissements d'Avenir: LABEX) with a budget of 10 million euros between 2011 to 2020.Public Policy Evaluation, Interdisciplinary Research in Social Sciences

Job and Workers Flows in Europe and the US: Specific Skills or Employment Protection?. Midwest Macroeconomics Meetings 2007, April 27-29, 2007, Cleveland, Ohio.

There is more resistance to layoffs in continental Europe than in the U.S. At the same time, there is some evidence that employed European workers are more productive than their American counterparts. We reconcile these two facts by proposing that some institutions, such as Employment Protection Legislation (EPL), induce workers to invest in and develop job specific skills, making them more productive and leading to costly displacement as these types of skills are lost upon separation from the employer. It is also well established that mobility patterns -flows in and out of unemployment or even movements from job to job, are reduced in continental Europe relative to the U.S. The possibility to invest in skill improvement introduces a complementarity between EPL and the investment decision: more stable matches increase the incentive to accumulate specific skills; but also more productive matches are broken less frequently; hence there is a “mutliplier” effect arising from this complementarity. To quantitatively assess all these propositions, we built a tractable asymmetric information matching model featuring all types of transitions out of employment: layoffs, quits to unemployment and job-to-job transitions. We find that EPL does induce workers to invest more in human capital and may help explain greater resistance to layoffs in Europe. We find that flows out of employment are indeed reduced by EPL. However, allowing for skill investment does not generate any strong multiplier due to the fact several new effects are at play keeping unemployment duration at a low level and thus putting downward pressure on the multiplier. The conclusion of all this may be that EPL matters for explaining specialization and low movements out of jobs, but that low movements out of unemployment may be better explained by other institutions such as unemployment benefits.