Hiring And Firing Costs, Adverse Selection And The Persistence Of Unemployment
Abstract
In this paper, we present a matching model with adverse selection that explains why flows into and out of unemployment are much lower in Europe compared to North America, while employment-to-employment flows are similar in the two continents. In the model, firms use discretion in terms of whom to fire and, thus, low quality workers are more likely to be dismissed than high quality workers. Moreover, as hiring and firing costs increase, firms find it more costly to hire a bad worker and, thus, they prefer to hire out of the pool of employed job seekers rather than out of the pool of the unemployed, who are more likely to turn out to be 'lemons'. We use microdata for Spain and the US and find that the ratio of the job finding probability of the unemployed to the job finding probability of employed job seekers was smaller in Spain than in the US. Furthermore, using US data, we find that the discrimination against the unemployed increased over the 1980's in those states that raised firing costs by introducing exceptions to the employment-at-will doctrine.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number 2410.Length:
Date of creation: Mar 2000
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:2410
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Related research
Keywords: Adverse Selection; Discrimination; Matching Models; Turnover Costs; Unemployment; Worker Flows;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution
- J41 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Labor Contracts
- J63 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs
- J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
- J65 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - Unemployment Insurance; Severance Pay; Plant Closings
- J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Vodopivec, Milan & Raju, Dhushyanth, 2002. "Income support systems for the unemployed : issues and options," Social Protection Discussion Papers 25529, The World Bank.
- Daniel, Kirsten & Siebert, W. Stanley, 2004.
"Does Employment Protection Reduce the Demand for Unskilled Labor?,"
IZA Discussion Papers
1290, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
- Kirsten Daniel & W. S. Siebert, 2005. "Does employment protection reduce the demand for unskilled labour?," International Economic Journal, Korean International Economic Association, vol. 19(2), pages 197-222.
- Eriksson, Stefan, 2002. "Imperfect information, wage formation, and the employability of the unemployed," Working Paper Series 2002:17, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
- Pekka Ilmakunnas & Mika Maliranta, 2004. "Hiring from unemployment and separation to unemployment," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 11(2), pages 91-95.
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