Most governments are mandated to maintain their economies at full employment. We propose that the best marker of full employment is the efficient unemployment rate, u*. We define u* as the unemployment rate that minimizes the nonproductive use of labor--both jobseeking and recruiting. The...

This study documents how job seekers update perceived job-finding prospects by unemployment duration and by learning about aggregate unemployment. We find that job seekers perceive an 18% decline in their job-finding probability for each additional month of unemployment, but perceive a higher...

Principal-agent models take outside options, determining participation and incentive constraints, as given. We construct a general equilibrium model where workers' reservation wages and the maximum punishment acceptable before workers quit are instead determined endogenously. We simultaneously...

This paper studies how gradualism affects the welfare gains from trade, technology, and reforms. When people face adjustment frictions, gradual shocks create less adverse distributional effects in the short run. We show that there are welfare gains from inducing a more gradual transition via...

Before 1979, unemployment insurance (UI) benefits were not treated as taxable income in the United States. Several economists criticized this policy on the ground that not taxing UI benefits while taxing earned income allegedly encourages unemployed persons to conduct longer than socially...

Monetary policy is conventionally understood to influence labor demand, with little effect on labor supply. We estimate the response of labor market flows to high-frequency changes in interest rates around FOMC announcements and Fed Chair speeches and find that, in contrast to the consensus...

We analyze a Bewley-Huggett-Aiyagari incomplete-markets model with labor-market frictions. Consumers are subject to idiosyncratic employment shocks against which they cannot insure directly. The labor market has a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides structure: firms enter by posting vacancies and match...

The Great Recession has renewed interest in Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs around the world. At the same time, there have been important advances in both theory and measurement of UI. In this paper, we first use the theory to present a unified treatment of the welfare effects of UI benefit...

A regression kink design (RKD or RK design) can be used to identify casual effects in settings where the regressor of interest is a kinked function of an assignment variable. In this paper, we apply an RKD approach to study the effect of unemployment benefits on the duration of joblessness in...

We study the consequences of product and labor market reforms in a two-country model with endogenous producer entry and labor market frictions. We focus on the role of business cycle conditions and external constraints at the time of reform implementation (or of a credible commitment to it) in...