This study examines what one can infer from aggregate time-series of employment under the assumption that adjustment at the micro level is discrete because of lumpy adjustment costs. The research uses various sets of quarterly and monthly data for the United States and imposes assumptions about...

We examine the timing of firms' operations in a formal model of labor demand. Merging a variety of data sets from Portugal from 1995-2004, we describe temporal patterns of firms' demand for labor and estimate production-functions and relative labor-demand equations. The results demonstrate the...

The paper demonstrates the general difficulty of inferring the structure of adjustment costs from aggregated, including industry data, except in the unlikely case that costs are symmetric and quadratic at the micro level. The implications of this difficulty for cross-national comparisons of...

This study reviews empirical research on the demand for labor. The static analysis discusses the production parameters describing homogeneous labor and labor disaggregated along various criteria; the distinction between workers and hours; the importance of job dynamics; and the nature of a...

This study postulates an internal labor market in which workers accumulate firm-specific human capital that raises the value of the firm and insulates it to some extent from the vagaries of product demand that might result in its closing. Negative product-market shocks reduce wage growth and...

I formulate measures of the effective minimum wage, based on broad definitions of the labor costs that face employers, and use these measures in reestimating some simple equations relating the relative employment of youths and adults to the U.S. minimum wage using aggregate data for 1954-78.I...