Ludo Visschers

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · School of Economics

We study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the employment contracts and job tenures of couples, and how these are shaped by gender and the presence of children. Using the Spanish Labour Force Survey, we find that women with children have suffered relatively larger losses of higher-duration, permanent jobs since the pandemic than men or women...

This paper studies the extent to which the cyclicality of occupational mobility shapes that of aggregate unemployment and its duration distribution. We document the relation between workers' occupational mobility and unemployment duration over the long run and business cycle. To interpret this evidence, we develop a multi-sector business cycle mode...

The impact of the pandemic on the UK labour market has been extremely heterogeneous across occupations and industries. Using novel data on job search, we document how individuals adjust their job search in response to changing employment patterns across occupations and industries in the UK. We observe that workers changed their search direction in...

This paper studies the extent to which the cyclicality of occupational mobility shapes that of aggregate unemployment and its duration distribution. We document the relation between workers' occupational mobility and unemployment duration over the long run and business cycle. To interpret this evidence, we develop a multisector business cycle model...

We investigate the behavior of aggregate hours supplied by workers in permanent (open-ended) contracts and temporary contracts, distinguishing changes in employment (extensive margin) and hours per worker (intensive margin). We focus on the differences between the Great Recession and the start of the COVID-19 Recession. In the Great Recession, the...

We revisit the hypothesis that cyclical fluctuations in unemployment are caused by shocks to the discount rate. We use a simple but rich search-theoretic model of the labour market in which the UE, EU and EE rates are all endogenous. Analytically, we show that an increase in the discount rate lowers the UE rate and, under some natural conditions, i...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller will take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the seller receives no better offers. We construct an environment with...

Using quarterly data for the U.K. from 1993 through 2012, we document that the extent of worker reallocation across occupations or industries (a career change, in the parlance of this paper) is high and procyclical. This holds true after controlling for workers׳ previous labour market status and for changes in the composition of who gets hired over...

Workers in less-secure jobs are often paid less than identical-looking workers in more secure jobs. We show that this lack of compensating differentials for unemployment risk can arise in equilibrium when all workers are identical and firms differ only in job security (i.e. the probability that the worker is not sent into unemployment). In a settin...

n a market in which sellers compete by posting mechanisms, we study how the properties of the meeting technology affect the mechanism that sellers select. In general, sellers have incentive to use mechanisms that are socially efficient. In our environment, sellers achieve this by posting an auction with a reserve price equal to their own valuation,...

In a market in which sellers compete by posting mechanisms, we study how the properties of the meeting technology affect the mechanism that sellers select. In general, sellers have incentive to use mechanisms that are socially efficient. In our environment, sellers achieve this by posting an auction with a reserve price equal to their own valuation...

Precautionary demand for money is significant in the data, and may have important implications for business-cycle dynamics of velocity and other nominal aggregates. Accounting for such dynamics is a standing challenge in monetary macroeconomics: standard business-cycle models that have incorporated money have failed to generate realistic prediction...

We build an analytically and computationally tractable stochastic equilibrium model of unemployment in heterogeneous labor markets. Facing search frictions within markets and reallocation frictions between markets, workers endogenously separate from employment and endogenously reallocate between markets, in response to changing aggregate and local...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the seller receives no better offers. Despite their prevalenc...

We develop a life-cycle model of the labor market in which different worker-firm matches have different quality and the assignment of the right workers to the right firms is time consuming because of search and learning frictions. The rate at which workers move between unemployment, employment and across different firms is endogenous because search...

Workers in less secure jobs are often paid less than identical-looking workers in more secure jobs. We show that this lack of compensating differentials for unemployment risk can arise in equilibrium when all workers are identical, and firms differ, but do so only in offered job security (the probability that the worker is not sent into unemploymen...

We investigate quantitative implications of precautionary demand for money for business cycle dynamics of velocity and other nominal aggregates. Accounting for such dynamics is a standing challenge in monetary macroeconomics: standard business cycle models that have incorporated money have failed to generate realistic predictions in this regard. In...

A peculiar principle of legal evidence in common law systems is that probative evidence may be excluded in order to increase the accuracy of fact-finding. A formal model is provided that rationalizes this principle. The key assumption is that the fact-finders (jurors) have a cognitive cost of processing evidence. Within this framework, the judge ex...

Shimer's calibrated version of the Mortensen-Pissarides model generates unemployment fluctuates much smaller than the data. Hagedorn and Manovskii present an alternative calibration that yields fluctuations consistent with the data, but this has been challenged by Costain and Reiter, who say it generates unrealistically big differences in unemploym...

In this paper we study the relation between different layoff rates among firms and their equilibrium size and wage offers. Empirically, firms with low job security pay lower wages, and are generally small. The theory of compensating wage differentials would lead us to expect the higher wages to offset the layoff risk. In our model, homogeneous work...

Empirically, we often observe that the characteristics of both partners, in particular wealth, in a match are positively correlated. In many models of investment in descendants and intergenerational wealth mobility, this point is often taken as the starting premise of the model. But can we explain why people match assortatively in wealth? In a worl...

the model account for relevant properties of the data, but not very significantly. The biggest quantitative potential for search frictions in this setting appears to be in the dynamic implications they generate for inventories and markups in the retail sector. Assessment of this potential is in progress.

Two essential aspects of many employment relationships are, (1) that they are meant to last a long time, and (2) that the participation of the worker and the firm in the match cannot be enforced during the relationship. I construct a model which takes the bilateral uncertainty of participation seriously, and characterize the optimal contract. In a...