The editors of Labour Economics are pleased to announce the year 2010 winner of the 5th "EALE Labour Economics Prize" for the best paper published in Labour Economics during the period 2008-2009. The prize, funded by the European Association of Labour Economists, is one-thousand Euro (1,000).The winner also receives from Elsevier a copy of the most recent volumes of the Handbook of Labor Economics (Volumes 3ABC) or books to an equivalent value.

The panel thought that this was a distinctive paper that had significant novelty and was extremely professionally executed.

This paper takes a partial equilibrium on-the-job search model to a decade (1996–2006) of repeated cross-sections from the U.S. Current Population Survey. Each month, a set of parameters ruling worker mobility between labor market states and along the wage ladder is estimated using wage distributions and individual transitions. In particular, job-to-job mobility is decomposed into a voluntary component (on-the-job search) and an involuntary one (job reallocation). The resulting time series of transition parameters are first used in a longitudinal analysis of labor turnover and search frictions. Job reallocations are shown to be key in the acyclical behavior of the job separation rate, and in the procyclical behavior of the probability of changing job. Moreover, an index of search frictions is computed and shown to follow no cyclical pattern. The paper then turns to an estimation of the matching function with both unemployed and employed job seekers. The transition parameters from the job search model are used as weights in an aggregate indicator of labor supply. The inclusion of employed workers increases the estimates of the elasticities of the matching function with respect to its two inputs (labor supply and job vacancies).

On behalf of the editorial panel
Ian Walker

Previous Prize winners:

2008
Scott E. Carrell
"The National Internal Labor Market Encounters the Local Labor Market: Effects on Employee Retention"
Labour Economics, Volume 14, Issue 5, October 2007, Pages 774-787.

2006
Kenneth Carling & Laura Larsson
“Does early intervention help the unemployed youth?”
Labour Economics, Volume 12, Issue 3, June 2005, Pages 301-319

2004
Ragui Assaad and Insan Tunali
“Wage formation and recurrent unemployment”
Labour Economics, Volume 9, Issue 1, February 2002, Pages 17-61

2002
Heather Antecol
"An examination of cross-country differences in the gender gap in labor force participation rates",
Labour Economics, Volume 7, Issue 4, July 2000, Pages 409-426

Labour Economics Prize

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