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...

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...

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...

An incomplete markets life-cycle model with indivisible labour makes career lengths and human capital accumulation respond to labour tax rates and government supplied non-employment benefits. We compare aggregate and individual outcomes in this individualistic incomplete markets model with those...

General equilibrium analysis of layoff costs have had mixed messages on the implications for employment. This Paper brings out the economic forces at work and explains the disparate results. Specifically, we show that positive employment effects of layoff costs come through reducing labour...

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8-10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by...

Adding generous government supplied benefits to Prescott's (2002) model with employment lotteries and private consumption insurance causes employment to implode and prevents the model from matching outcomes observed in Europe. To understand the role of a 'not-so-well-known aggregation theory'...