Etienne Wasmer

Equilibrium Search Unemployment, Endogenous Participation, And Labor Market Flows

The sustainability of Welfare States requires high employment/high participation to raise the tax base and avoid distortions. To analyse labour market participation decisions in a world with market frictions, we propose and solve a three-state macro model of the labour market. We show that workers decisions of entering into the labour market and exiting from the labour market are fundamentally different in the presence of frictions: irreversible costs paid by workers at the entry level imply that labour supply is determined by two margins, the entry and the exit margins. On the normative point of view, we show that the existence of two margins alters significantly the conventional effects of payroll taxes and unemployment benefits. On the positive point of view, our model rationalizes the existence of most labour market flows and of marginally attached workers. Furthermore, a calibration improves the usual representations of labour markets.

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.

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 experience becomes higher but there is no persistence of the supply shock.