This paper reconsiders the traditional approach to human capital measurement in the study of cross-country income differences. Within a broader class of neoclassical human capital aggregators, traditional accounting is found to be a theoretical lower bound on human capital difference across...

If workers self-select into industries based upon their relative productivity in different tasks, and comparative advantage is aligned with absolute advantage, then the average efficacy of a sector's workforce will be negatively correlated with its employment share. This might explain the...

We develop a framework where mismatch between vacancies and job seekers across sectors translates into higher unemployment by lowering the aggregate job-finding rate. We use this framework to measure the contribution of mismatch to the recent rise in U.S. unemployment by exploiting two sources...

In a reasonably calibrated Mortensen and Pissarides matching model, shocks to average labor productivity can account for a small portion of the fluctuations in unemployment and vacancies (Shimer (2005)). I add heterogeneity in jobs (matches) with respect to the time the job is created in the...

We examine monthly variation in weekly work hours using data from 2003 to 2010. The data sources include the Current Population Survey (CPS) on hours/worker, the Current Employment Survey (CES) on hours/job, and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) on both. The ATUS data minimize recall...