equilibrium search models and the transition from school to work this paper applies the burdett mortensen 1998 equilibrium search model to study the school to work transitions of u s high school graduates we consider the case of discrete firm heterogeneity and provide a computational method to obtain the mle our results show that unemployed blacks receive fewer offers than whites and employed blacks are more likely to lose their jobs importantly employed blacks and whites receive job offers at the same rate assigning the whites search parameters to the blacks and re solving reveals that 75 percent of the observed wage differential is explained by the job destruction rate differences

gender wage gaps reconsidered a structural approach using matched employer employee data in this paper we study the extent to which wage differentials between men and women can be explained by differences in productivity disparities in friction patterns segregation and wage discrimination for this purpose we propose an equilibrium search model that features rent splitting on the job search and two sided heterogeneity in productivity the model is estimated using german matched employer employee data overall the results reveal that female workers are less productive and more mobile than males in addition female workers have on average slightly lower bargaining power than their male counterparts

is there a glass ceiling in sweden using 1998 data we show that the gender log wage gap in sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail we interpret this as a strong glass ceiling effect we use quantile regression decompositions to examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or in the rewards to those characteristics even after extensive controls for gender differences in age education both level and field sector industry and occupation we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent

the impact of body weight on occupational mobility and career development this paper examines the relationship between individuals weight and their employment decisions over the life cycle i estimate a dynamic stochastic model of individuals annual joint decisions of occupation hours worked and schooling the model allows body weight to affect non monetary costs switching costs and distribution of wages for each occupation and also allows individuals employment decisions to affect body weight i use conditional density estimation to formulate the distributions of wages and body weight evolution i find that heavier individuals face higher switching costs when transitioning into white collar occupations earn lower returns to experience in white collar occupations and earn lower wages in socially intensive jobs simulating the model with estimated parameters decreased occupational mobility accounts for 10 percent of the obesity wage gap while contemporaneous wage penalties for body weight are small the cost over the life cycle is substantial an exogenous increase in initial body mass by 20 percent leads to a 10 percent decrease in wages over the life course

endogenous inequality in integrated labor markets with two sided search we consider a market with red and green workers where labels are payoff irrelevant workers may acquire skills skilled workers search for vacancies while firms search for workers a unique symmetric equilibrium exists in which color is irrelevant there are also asymmetric equilibria in which firms search only for green workers more green than red workers acquire skills skilled green workers receive higher wages and the unemployment rate is higher among skilled red workers discrimination between ex ante identical individuals arises in equilibrium and yet firms have perfect information about their workers and strictly prefer to hire minority workers

a search interpretation of male female wage differentials a general equilibrium search framework is used to examine the role of gender differences in labor market behavior patterns e g quit rates for personal reasons in determining gender wage differentials for samples of high school and college graduates from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy these behavioral patterns are found to be significantly different across the sexes and account for 20 30 of the wage differentials in particular they play a key role in explaining the male female wage differential that remains after controlling for the gender composition across occupations

labour market performance effects of discrimination and loss of skill we examine the impact of discrimination on labor market performance when workers are subject to a risk of losing skills during an unemployment experience within a search and matching framework we show that both natives and immigrants are affected by discrimination discrimination in one sector has positive spillovers inducing employment to increase in the other sector and the effect on labor market performance therefore depends on whether discrimination is present in only one sector or in both discrimination may induce workers to train more or less than natives after having lost their skills dependent upon in which sector there is discrimination net output tends to be most negatively affected by discrimination among high skilled workers jel j15 j31 j61 j64 j71

discrimination in an equilibrium search model i construct an equilibrium search model where some employers have a distaste for hiring minority workers and show that this bias results in economic discrimination against minority workers although only unprejudiced firms hire minority workers minority workers receive lower wages than workers not facing discrimination whenever any employers in the market have a distaste for minority workers one implication of the model is that gender or racial wage differentials understate the utility loss from discrimination in addition the wages of minority workers increase when their proportion increases in the labor market

on gender gaps and self fulfilling expectations alternative implications of paid for training i introduction the recent literature on gender differences in the labor market has focused mainly on two issues the first one deals with the mechanisms e g adverse selection that can amplify initial differences in preferences or productivity across genders leading to sizeable gender gaps in wages labor force participation or working hours these models help us understand to what extent changes in gender gaps have been due to changes in fundamentals including differences in the pattern of endogenous accumulation of human capital by men and women 1 the second one is related to the channels explaining persistence in gender gaps even when exogenous differences across the sexes are of little importance or even absent 2 these studies tend to rely upon the existence of incentive problems in the labor market e g moral hazard leading to self fulfilling prophecies about differences in gender roles without assuming any initial comparative advantages our paper falls into this second strand of the literature by considering an alternative mechanism based on statistical discrimination by firms in the provision of paid for training to male and female workers this yields multiplicity of equilibria in gender gaps even in the absence of moral hazard 3 the basic idea in models of gender gaps relying upon self fulfilling prophecies is that employers beliefs about women s lower attachment to the labor market lead to wage differentials in favor of men hence since women expect to face a lower expected opportunity cost they end up devoting more time to housework validating in this way firms beliefs for example albanesi and olivetti 2009 propose a model where firms are subject to incentive compatible constraints due to their imperfect monitoring of workers effort a moral hazard problem and of hours of housework an adverse selection problem as a result different types of labor contracts are offered to men and women in a similar vein lommerud and vagstad 2007 deal with a model where firms allocate workers to fast and slow track jobs the former requiring a fixed investment cost if women have traditionally exerted primary major responsibility at home and wages are non contractible they will predominantly follow a mommy track in equilibrium while incentive problems often used to derive additional predictions on the structure of wages to be confronted with the data provide a useful modeling device they could be somewhat restrictive for instance concerning the difficulty of perfectly monitoring effort pay gaps should be negligible for routine tasks performed by less skilled employees for whom effort and output should be easily observable yet even after removing differences in observable characteristics and in the overall wage dispersion there is evidence about substantial gender gaps in hourly wages in these categories see e g blau and kahn 2000 bassanini and saint martin 2008 de la rica et al 2008 our paper contributes to this literature by proposing a novel mechanism which does not rely on incentive problems we consider a two period model in which firms initially offer paid for training to workers taking as given the division of housework between spouses in the second period spouses decide on how to split the certain and uncertain parts of housework where the latter is captured by the realization of a shock affecting household tasks during this period e g unexpected need of housework or events that require parental leave etc both decisions interact because the housework decision determines whether a spouse works or quits after receiving training and the firm chooses the amount of training without observing the household s housework allocation statistical discrimination arises in this setup as a result of firms prior beliefs about which spouse is more likely to quit the job under the key assumptions that wages are predetermined with respect to housework shocks and that the household does not re optimize after the shock is revealed asymmetric beliefs will induce differences in the provision of training across spouses

electoral information in developed stock market testing conditional heteroscedasticity in the market model this investigates the influence of major electoral information on abnormal returns around the announcement date in the developed stock market and examines whether these explanatory variables are associated with observed cumulative abnormal returns using a regression analysis the analytical results demonstrate that average abnormal returns are significantly negative before the date of the announcement of the results of a general election on days 6 and 3 and after that announcement date on days 4 6 and 10 this phenomenon can be attributed to hedging activity of the investors to reduce risk

gender discrimination estimation in a search model with matching and bargaining this article develops a search model of the labor market with matching bargaining and employers taste discrimination in which under necessary but standard distributional assumption it is possible to separately identify gender discrimination and unobserved productivity differences the equilibrium shows that both prejudiced and unprejudiced employers wage discriminate maximum likelihood estimates on cps data indicate that half of the employers are prejudiced average female productivity is 6 5 lower and two third of the gender earning differential may be explained by prejudice an affirmative action policy is implemented resulting in a redistribution of welfare from men to women at no cost for employers welfare

search bargaining and employer discrimination this article analyzes becker s 1957 1971 theory of employer discrimination within a search and wage bargaining setting discriminatory firms pay workers who are discriminated against less and apply stricter hiring criteria to these workers the highest profits are realized by firms with a positive discrimination coefficient moreover once ownership and management are separated both highest profits and highest utility can be realized by firms with a positive discrimination coefficient thus market forces like entry or takeovers do not ensure that wage differentials due to employer discrimination disappear

minimum wage effects on labor market outcomes under search matching and endogenous contact rates building upon a continuous time model of search with nash bargaining in a stationary environment we analyze the effect of changes in minimum wages on labor market outcomes and welfare although minimum wage increases may or may not lead to increases in unemployment in our model they can be welfare improving to labor market participants on both the supply and demand sides of the labor market we discuss identification of the model using current population survey data on accepted wages and unemployment durations and show that by incorporating a limited amount of information from the demand side of the market it is possible to obtain credible and precise estimates of all primitive parameters we show that the optimal minimum wage in 1996 depends critically on whether or not contact rates can be considered to be exogenous and we note that the limited variation in minimum wages makes testing this assumption problematic

the impact of party alternative on the stock market the case of japan this paper tries to clarify whether change in political regime has an effect on the behaviour of the stock market in japan the empirical study finds that the transition of ruling party effect is not a crucial variable to the nikkei 225 the alienation felt by the japanese about the political environment resulting in a succession of prime ministers does not influence the nikkei 225 stock market behaviour therefore former prime ministers who have resigned have become scapegoats for the poor performance of financial and economic policies

elections and uk government expenditure cycles in the 1980s an empirical analysis this paper tests whether there exists any significant difference in the responsiveness of uk government expenditure policy to changes in national income and unemployment in pre and post election periods the absence of such a political effect would see the national income and unemployment elasticities for government expenditure being uniform over an election period the empirical analysis deliberately covers the three uk conservative governments between 1979 and 1992 when academic debate on the implications of discretionary policy for the economy and social welfare were particularly prominent and when it appeared that political rhetoric concurred with the academic prescriptions

sources of earnings inequality estimates from an on the job search model of the us labor market since the early 1980s the labor market in the united states has seen a substantial increase in earnings dispersion we study the issue by developing an on the job search model of the us labor market that allows for wage and employment mobility as a result of optimal individual behavior we estimate its structural parameters on psid data at different points in time to clarify the sources of the evolution of earnings inequality and instability between 1987 and 1996 this procedure allows to compute lifetime measure of inequality on top of the usual cross sectional measure of inequality and provide counterfactual experiments that evaluate the contribution of different parameters to changes over time by taking into account some equilibrium effects we find that the increase in lifetime inequality and in cross sectional inequality have been generated by different sources and that these sources are different by skills changes in the wage offer distribution are the main determinant of the increase in inequality for skilled workers while both mobility changes and wage offer distribution changes are needed to explain changes for the unskilled

public sector price controls and electoral cycles public enterprise prices are important policy instruments in developing economies this is why public sector price polices constitute a key element of stabilization programmes implemented in these economies however this significance is not specific to stabilization episodes first this study questions whether an opportunistic politician can manipulate public prices to win elections it analyses the impact of such price controls on budget deficits and the repercussions of alternative financing mechanisms of these deficits on the inflation rate and voters behaviour it is shown that electoral inflation cycles are obtained under domestic debt financing whereas money financing does not permit such a manipulative policy second by focusing on data of the turkish economy for the 1987 1 2003 12 period empirical evidence for such manipulative policies is given

estimating a structural search model the transition from school to work this paper presents a finite horizon search model that is econometrically implemented using all of the restrictions impli ed by the theory following a sample of male high school graduates fr om the youth cohort of the national longitudinal surveys from graduat ion to employment search parameters are estimated reservation wages and offer probabilities are estimated to be quite low simulations a re performed of the impact of changing the parameters on the expected duration of unemployment copyright 1987 by the econometric society

monetary innovations capital taxation and real wage movements some new evidence central to many new classical macroeconomic models is the notion that unanticipated money growth affects real wages adversely while anticipated money growth is neutral to date however the empirical evidence on the subject has been mixed early studies of sargent and sims 29 and sims 30 reported that monetary surprises had a positive effect on real wages leiderman 18 however provided evidence consistent with the implications of these models the results of more recent studies have also been ambiguous koray 16 concludes that anticipated money growth has an adverse effect on total real wages but unanticipated money growth is neutral in contrast kim 15 finds that both anticipated and unanticipated money growth have negative effects on real wages one difficulty with these studies is the implicit assumption that real wage movements are primarily caused by aggregate demand disturbances in a recent paper sumner and silver 33 assert that real shocks can also have an important influence on real wages and should be taken into account

the gender wage gap and the role of reservation wages new evidence for unemployed workers this paper examines the importance of differences in reservation wages for the gender wage gap based on two waves of rich survey data for a sample of newly unemployed individuals in germany we perform a decomposition analysis including measures for reservation wages detailed information on education socio demographics labor market history as well as personality traits in order to address the potential endogeneity of reservation wages we exploit a generated instrumental variable strategy that relies on heteroscedasticity of the error terms our findings indicate that the gender wage gap becomes small and statistically insignificant once we control for reservation wages moreover we perform a subgroup analysis that provides valuable insights about the importance of potentially unobserved characteristics that affect reservation wages and realized wages simultaneously reasons for differences in reservation wages could arise from productivity differences the fact that women anticipate discrimination and different unobserved traits or preferences

estimating the effect of racial discrimination on first job wage offers in this paper we develop and implement a method for bounding the extent to which labor market discrimination can account for racial wage differentials the method is based on a two sided search matching model that formally accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and unobserved offered wages we find that racial differences in offered wages are proportionately twice three times as large as racial differences in accepted wages for high school dropouts high school graduates the results indicate that discrimination could account for the entire racial wage offer differential for high school dropouts and for high school graduates i e the bound on the extent of discrimination is not informative

estimation of equilibrium wage distributions with heterogeneity summary equilibrium search models generalize the one sided models used earlier by endogenizing the wage offer distribution attempts to estimate versions of these equilibrium n search models have been unsuccessful ironically because the predicted wage distribution did not fit the wage data in this paper we extend the applicability of search models by introducing firm heterogeneity to account for the shape of the wage density the resulting estimation problem is difficult but we propose a solution and illustrate its feasibility and performance with a monte carlo study and an application to us labour market data

will affirmative action policies eliminate negative stereotypes a key question concerning affirmative action is whether the labor market gains it brings to minorities can continue without it becoming a permanent fixture in the labor market the authors argue that this depends on how the policy affects employers beliefs about the productivity of minority workers they study the joint determination of employer beliefs and worker productivity in a model of statistical discrimination in job assignments the authors prove that even when identifiable groups are equally endowed ex ante affirmative action can bring about a situation in which employers correctly perceive the groups to be unequally productive ex post copyright 1993 by american economic association

works councils wages and job satisfaction we investigate the effects of works councils on employees wages and job satisfaction in general and for subgroups with respect to sex and occupational status making use of a german representative sample of employees we find that employees who move to a firm with a works council report increases in job satisfaction but do not receive particular wage increases especially the job satisfaction of female employees is affected by a change in works council status however we do not find support for the hypothesis that the introduction of a works council itself increases wages or job satisfaction for the employees staying at the firm

estimating a dynamic adverse selection model labour force experience and the changing gender earnings gap 1968 1997 this paper addresses two questions what accounts for the gender gap in labour market outcomes what are the driving forces behind the changes in the gender labour market outcomes over the period 1968 1997 it formulates a dynamic general equilibrium model of labour supply occupational sorting and human capital accumulation in which gender discrimination and an earnings gap arise endogenously it uses this model to quantify the driving forces behind the decline in the gender earnings gap and the increase in female labour force participation the proportion of women working in professional occupations and hours worked it finds that labour market experience is the most important factor explaining the gender earnings gap in addition statistical discrimination accounts for a large fraction of the observed gender earnings gap and its decline it also finds that a large increase in aggregate productivity in professional occupations plays a major role in the increase in female labourforce participation number of hours worked and the proportion of females working in professional occupations although of less importance demographic changes account for a substantial part of the increase in female labour force participation and hours worked whereas home production technology shocks do not

the composition of wage differentials between migrants and natives we consider the role of unobservables such as differences in search frictions reservation wages and productivities for the explanation of wage differentials between migrants and natives we disentangle these by estimating an empirical general equilibrium search model with on the job search due to bontemps et al 1999 on segments of the labour market defined by occupation age and nationality using a large scale german administrative dataset the native migrant wage differential is then decomposed into several parts and we focus especially on the component that we label migrant effect being the difference in wage offers between natives and migrants in the same occupation age segment in firms of the same productivity counterfactual decompositions of wage differentials allow us to identify and quantify their drivers thus explaining within a common framework what is often labelled the unexplained wage gap

sex discrimination in restaurant hiring an audit study in an audit study of sex discrimination in hiring comparably matched pairs of men and women applied for jobs as waiters and waitresses at restaurants in philadelphia in high price restaurants where earnings are higher job applications from women had an estimated probability of receiving a job offer that was lower by about 0 4 and an estimated probability of receiving an interview that was lower by about 0 35 both estimated differentials are statistically significant additional evidence suggests that customer discrimination partly underlies the hiring discrimination

does personal background influence a finance minister to cook the books an investigation of creative accounting in swiss cantons abstractthis article aims to identify the factors influencing the use of creative accounting in the public sector its distinctive feature is that it sheds light on creative accounting when used not to hide public deficits but to conceal surpluses it especially explores the impact of the finance minister s fm s background on the phenomenon we take advantage of the quasi experimental settings of the swiss cantons in which the financial management act sets out the possibility of implementing certain accounting gimmicks including mainly additional depreciation charges these charges which are depreciations in name only enable the fm to artificially inflate expenses thus increasing the deficit or reducing the surplus our panel data set of the 26 cantons over the period 1980 2012 includes a new data set of creative accounting and of 116 cantonal fms our results indicate that the fms cook the books irrespective of their personal or ideological background with the exception that trained economists

discrimination and skill differences in an equilibrium search model in this paper we analyze an equilibrium search model with three sources for wage an d unemployment differentials among workers with the same observed human capital but differen t appearance race unobserved productivity skill search in tensities and discrimination becker 1957 due to an appearance based employer disutility factor because they affect the earnings distributions differently empirical identification of these potential sources for the explanation of wage an d unemployment differentials is possible we show that the structural parameters of the model including the firm s disutility from certain workers are identifiab le using standard labor market survey data we demonstrate identification using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth estimation of these parameters by matching moments from a sample of black and white high school graduate s implies a blacks have a 9 lower productivi ty level than whites b the disutility factor in employer s preferences is one third of the white s productivity level and c 50 of firms have a disutility factor in their utility toward blacks

consumer discrimination and self employment self employment rates and incomes differ significantly by race we show that these differentials arise in markets with consumer discrimination and incomplete information about the price of the good and the race of the seller equilibrium income distributions have two properties mean black incomes are lower than mean white incomes and the returns to ability are lower for black than for white sellers able blacks therefore are less likely to self select into the self employment sector than able whites using the 1980 census data we find that observed racial differences in the self employment income distributions are consistent with the theoretical predictions

the effect of statistical discrimination on black white wage inequality estimating a model with multiple equilibria this article presents the structural estimation of the parameters of a statistical discrimination model although the model is capable of displaying multiple equilibria an estimation strategy that identifies both the model parameters and the equilibrium selected by the economic agents is developed and empirically implemented a comparison between the selected equilibria and the other potential equilibria reveals that the decline in wage inequality experienced in the u s economy cannot be attributed to changes in the equilibrium selection nonetheless a counterfactual experiment shows that in a color blind society blacks wage would have been on average more than 20 higher

labor supply preferences hours constraints and hours wage tradeoffs in a labor market with tied hours wage packages and wage dispersion for a particular type of job constrained workers may be willing to sacrifice wage gains for better hours when changing jobs likewise workers may accept jobs offering undesirable hours only if the associated wage gains are large we investigate this issue empirically by examining whether overemployment and underemployment on the initial and new job affects the relation between hours changes and wage changes for quitters our results generally support the view that an individual requires compensation to work in a job that given the individual s particular preferences offers unattractive hours

an equilibrium model of health insurance provision and wage determination we investigate the effect of employer provided health insurance on job mobility rates and economic welfare using a search matching and bargaining framework in our model health insurance coverage decisions are made in a cooperative manner that recognizes the productivity effects of health insurance as well as its nonpecuniary value to the employee the resulting equilibrium is one in which not all employment matches are covered by health insurance wages at jobs providing health insurance are larger in a stochastic sense than those at jobs without health insurance and workers at jobs with health insurance are less likely to leave those jobs even after conditioning on the wage rate we estimate the model using the 1996 panel of the survey of income and program participation and find that the employer provided health insurance system does not lead to any serious inefficiencies in mobility decisions

the political economy of the german lander deficits weak governments meet strong finance ministers we analyse the deficits of the german lander regional states for the period 1960 to 2005 and test a number of hypotheses derived from the literature on the political economy of public deficits we find evidence for the weak government hypothesis that is coalition governments issue significantly more debt than single party governments a result that is typically explained by the common pool problem as our data suggest this result crucially hinges on the position or strength of the finance minister within coalition governments we find that coalition governments with a strong finance minister are in terms of borrowing not significantly different from single party governments in addition we find weak evidence for an opportunistic political business cycle as borrowing is significantly lower in pre election years it appears that german voters favour fiscal discipline there is no evidence for partisan behaviour so party ideology seems to play a negligible role

duration to first job and the return to schooling estimates from a search matching model this paper investigates the properties of the joint distribution of the duration to the first post schooling full time job and of the accepted wage for that job within a search matchingbargaining theoretic model the model provides an interpretation of the observations on duration to first job and accepted wages that differentiates between behavioural influences and market fundamentals in determining the accepted wage schooling relationship the return to schooling is appropriately measured by differences in the wage offer distribution which depends only on market fundamentals we use data from the 1979 youth cohort of the national longitudinal surveys of labor market experience to follow several school leaving cohorts of young males a model which allows for five types of heterogeneous workers within schooling race groups fits the duration and wage data well for all such groups offer probabilities for all groups are estimated to be close to one mean offered wages are about 1000 less than mean accepted wages and the internal annual rate of return for attending college relative to graduating from high school is 32 for blacks and 17 for whites this paper investigates the properties of the joint distribution of the duration to the first post schooling full time job and of the accepted wage for that job within a search matching bargaining model it is a well established empirical regularity that hazard rates are decreasing with the duration of search unemployment it is also true for the data we use that the sample mean of the accepted wage associated with the first job is not increasing with duration these findings hold for both black and white male youth at all levels of schooling conditional on schooling however the time between leaving school and working at the first full time job is longer for blacks and their accepted mean wage is lower conditional on race the time between leaving school and working at the first full time job is shorter for those with higher levels of schooling and their accepted mean wage is higher interestingly blacks display a similar pattern of duration and accepted wages to whites who are one level of schooling below e g black high school graduates and white high school dropouts

affirmative action in a competitive economy abstract we consider a model of endogenous human capital formation with competitively determined wages discrimination is sustainable in equilibrium in the presence of two distinguishable but ex ante identical groups of workers an affirmative action policy consisting of a quota may fail in the sense that there still may be equilibria where groups are treated differently however the incentives to invest for agents in the discriminated group are improved by affirmative action if the initial equilibrium is the most discriminatory equilibrium in the model without the policy the welfare effects are ambiguous it is possible that the policy makes the intended beneficiaries worse off even if the starting point is the most discriminatory equilibrium the expected payoff may decrease for all agents in the target group

an empirical equilibrium search model of the labor market in structural empirical models of labor market search the distribution of wage offers is usually assumed to be exogenous however because in setting their wages profit maximizing firms should consider the reservation wages of job seekers the wage offer distribution is essentially endogenous we investigate whether a proposed equilibrium search model in which the wage offer distribution is endogenous is able to describe observed labor market histories we find that the distributions of job and unemployment spells are consistent with the data and that the qualitative predictions of the model for the wages set by employers are confirmed by wage regressions the model is estimated using panel data on unemployed and employed individuals we distinguish between separate segments of the labor market and we show that productivity heterogeneity is important to obtain an acceptable fit to the data the results are used to estimate the degree of monopsony power of firms further the effects of changes in the mandatory minimum wage are examined

a partner in crime assortative matching and bias in the crime market abstract in the market for criminals the prisoner s dilemma creates an incentive for every criminal to find a partner with a higher likelihood of success in evading arrest if no one is arrested no one will have to talk to the police about the partnership and be at fault for the arrest of the other partner this incentive leads to an equilibrium pattern of positive assortative matching pam on the likelihood of success using individual matched report arrest data from the national incident based reporting system and a novel empirical strategy i find that offenders generally match according to pam on the probability of success i find that matching between criminals of different race can be subject to search frictions such as availability of potential partners matching between genders is likely biased as females have a higher probability of success than males contrary to unconditional success ranking this bias persists in groups of three but diminishes in matches between older criminals consistent with notions of discrimination the results are of interest to policy makers who want to impede criminals from organizing

labour market structure and inequality a comparison of italy and the u s markets with rigid labour regulations and centralized wage setting are often thought to be inefficient but egalitarian using a model of off and on the job search and event history individual level data for italy and the u s we show that while the cross sectional wage distributions of young italian males are much more compressed than are the comparable distributions for young white u s males the estimated search model implies that the distribution of lifetime welfare is no more disperse in the u s than it is in italy our model implies that the high frequency of movements between labour market states leads to both a relatively equitable distribution of long run welfare in the u s and a high level of cross sectional inequality

wage differentials employer size and unemployment the unique equilibrium solution to a game in which a continuum of individual employers choose permanent wage offers and a continuum of workers search by sequentially sampling from the set of offers is characterized wage dispersion is a robust outcome provided that workers search while employed as well as when unemployed the unique nondegenerate equilibrium distribution of wage offers is constructed for three cases 1 identical workers and employers 2 identical employers and an atomless distribution of worker supply prices and 3 identical workers and an atomless distribution of job productivities copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

an equilibrium search model with coworker discrimination this article analyzes the effect of coworker discrimination on wage and unemployment differentials between males and females using a search model an increase in female participation drives up the wage offer to female workers and raises female employment moreover an increase in the degree of discrimination by males results in gains to them in terms of higher wages and lower unemployment but results in losses to females in terms of lower wages and higher unemployment the benefit to males provides an explanation for the persistence of discrimination