This course pursues three goals.
First, make the students familiar with major issues in the area of macro labor market analysis. We will deal with the sources of low-skill unemployment and wage inequality, with skillbiased technological change, with the effects and determinants of Employment Protection Legislation and unemployment compensation, with the impacts of trade and financial globalization, with changes in the labor share of income. Second, introduce a range of technical tools that have a wide application both inside and outside labor market analysis.

On the theoretical side, we will discuss two-sector trade models, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, the matching model of unemployment, monopsony models with a continuum of firms, some political economy of labor market institutions. On the empirical side, we will discuss existing macro datasets on labor market institutions, labor shares, and other aggregate features of the labor market; we will perform some panel data analysis (mainly fixed-effect models).
Third, stimulate imagination and encourage own reading. The course is designed to help the students to read recent papers. The notions and papers discussed in the course are voluntarily simplified to highlight ideas rather than technical aspects. Questions and problems that will be raised during the course motivate problemsolving skills: ability to create and solve simple models, ability to focus on simplified aspects of real-world features, ability to find and use adequate data.