The paper examines the effect of international regulatory harmonization on cross-border labor migration. We analyze directives in the European Union (EU) that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. This regulatory harmonization should make it less costly for those who work in the...

Interpreting accruals as working capital investment, we hypothesize that firms rationally adjust their investment to respond to discount rate changes. Consistent with the optimal investment hypothesis, we document that (i) the predictive power of accruals for future stock returns increases with...

We measure the effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment. We exploit the variation induced by the decision of Congress in December 2013 not to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Recession. Federal benefit extensions that ranged from 0 to 47...

We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the labor market implications of unemployment benefit extensions. In contrast to the existing literature that focused on estimating the effects of benefit duration on job search decisions by the unemployed – the micro effect...

Inherent in the definition of Pareto efficiency is the idea that, in dynamic environments, an individual is indexed by the history of events up to his birth (rather than, as usual, the date of birth). Here, we explore the implications of this natural formulation. The set of Pareto efficient...

U.S. labor markets became much less fluid in recent decades. Job reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 1990, and worker reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 2000. The declines cut across states, industries and demographic groups defined by age, gender and education....

This paper makes the following original contributions to the literature. (1) We develop a simpler analytical characterization and numerical algorithm for Bayesian inference in structural vector autoregressions that can be used for models that are overidentified, just-identified, or...

This paper tests for downward nominal wage rigidity in markets for casual daily agricultural labor in a developing country context. I examine transitory shifts in labor demand, generated by rainfall shocks, in 600 Indian districts from 1956-2009. First, there is asymmetric adjustment: nominal...

The recession of 2007-09 witnessed high rates of unemployment that have been slow to recede. This has led many to conclude that structural changes have occurred in the labor market and that the economy will not return to the low rates of unemployment that prevailed in the recent past. Is this...

Why are financial crises associated with a sustained rise in unemployment? We develop a tractable model with frictions in both credit and labor markets to study the aggregate and micro-level implications of a credit crunch--i.e., a tightening of collateral constraints. When we simulate a credit...