We provide a simple explanation for the observation that the variance of job destruction is greater than the variance of job creation. In our model profit maximization in the presence of proportional plant-level costs of job creation and destruction implies that shrinking plants are more...

In this paper I evaluate to what extent a real business cycle (RBC) model that incorporates search and leisure decisions can simultaneously account for the observed behavior of employment, unemployment and out-of-the-labor-force. This contrasts with the previous RBC literature, which analyzed...

This paper proposes a methodology for estimating job search models that does not require either functional form assumptions or ruling out the presence of unobserved variation in worker ability. In particular, building on existing results from record- value theory, a branch of statistics that...