We provide a joint account of the unemployment and labor force participation patterns of older male workers during the past half-century, and of the role of institutions that have shaped their employment experience. To do so, we build an equilibrium model with labor market frictions,...

This paper studies the secular behavior of worker reallocation across occupations in the US labor market. In the empirical analysis, we use 45 years of microdata to construct consistent time-series and document that the fraction of employment reallocated annually across occupations is remarkably...

The high labor supply elasticity in an indivisible-labor model with employment lotteries emerges also without lotteries when individuals must instead choose career lengths. The more elastic are earnings to accumulated working time, the longer is a worker's career. Negative (positive)...

We use three general equilibrium frameworks with jobs and unemployed workers to study the effects of government mandated unemployment insurance (UI) and employment protection (EP). To illuminate the forces in these models, we study how UI and EP affect outcomes when there is higher 'turbulence'...

Similar durations but lower flows into unemployment gave Europe lower unemployment rates than the United States until the 1970's. But since 1980, higher durations have kept unemployment rates in Europe persistently higher than in the U.S. A general equilibrium search model with human capital...

This Paper derives optimal employment contracts when workers are risk-averse and there are employment and unemployment risks. Without income insurance, consumption rises during employment and falls during unemployment. Optimal employment contracts offer severance compensation to smooth...

This paper surveys recent work in equilibrium models of labor markets characterized by search and recruitment frictions and by the need to reallocate workers across productive activities. The duration of unemployment and jobs and wage determination are treated as endogenous outcomes of job...

Theoretical predictions of the impact of TFP growth on unemployment are ambiguous, and depend on the extent to which new technology is embodied in new jobs. We evaluate a model with embodied and disembodied technology, capitalization, and creative destruction effects by estimating the impact of...

We recalibrate den Haan, Haefke, and Ramey's matching model to incorporate our preferred specification of 'turbulence' as causing distinct dynamics of human capital after voluntary and involuntary job losses. Under our calibration, with high unemployment benefits, an increase in turbulence...

To generate big responses of unemployment to productivity changes, researchers have reconfigured matching models in various ways: by elevating the utility of leisure, by making wages sticky, by assuming alternating-offer wage bargaining, by introducing costly acquisition of credit, or by...