- Basics
• Employment, unemployment, wages and working hours, productivity
and income: A tour around OECD countries
• In this step students will get familiar with the basic concepts of
economic employment theory and empirical facts of employment
trends based on international data sources.
- Labor supply: Who is working, who doesn’t?
• Economic theory of labor supply, supply elasticity, changes in
labor supply, human capital, and brief discussion of possible impacts
of institutions on labor supply
- Labor demand: What kind of labor, how much?
• Economic theory of labor demand, capital labor substitution,
substitution between high skilled and low skilled labor, human
capital, productivity and labor demand
- Coordination of supply and demand in labor markets
• The idealized market model
• Imperfect labor markets: matching, searching and hiring, information
asymmetries, signaling.
- Wage determination: What price for labor?
• Wages in uncoordinated labor markets, finding the equilibrium.
Minimum and reservation wages. Do flexible wages stabilize
employment? Why are wages sticky? Efficiency wage theories.
Good jobs and bad jobs.
• Wage estimations (Mincer wage regressions). Does the ‘law of
one price (wage)’ hold?: Krueger/ Summers interindustry wage
differentials)