Following the shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy may be significantly changed relative to the pre-pandemic world. One critical shift induced by the COVID- 19 pandemic is a need for physical distance (at least 6 feet apart) between workers and customers. In this study, we examine the...

Empirical results show that unemployment benefits (UB) recipients significantly change to worse job conditions with respect to wages and firm size, but change to better job conditions with respect to occupation, position, industry, and residence. While the effects for occupation are not...

This paper studies the impact of long-run productivity growth on job finding and separation rates, and thus the unemployment rate, using a search and matching model. We incorporate disembodied technological progress and on-the-job search into the endogenous job separation model of Mortensen and...

This paper constructs a two-country model of international trade to study how labor market frictions affect industry location patterns, unemployment rates, and fully endogenous productivity growth. We show that when the larger country offers subsidies to labor search costs or reduces...

We introduce a preference for wealth into the standard search and matching model to analyze the labor market when there is persistent demand shortage. We show that, under some conditions, a secular stagnation steady state exists in which the economy permanently operates below capacity due to...

This study uses an original dataset of online mid-career job ads for full-time sales jobs collected from July 2018 to December 2019 to examine the use of explicit and implied age limits on job applicants and characteristics of companies that set them. Although Japanese law prohibits age...

This paper investigates the occupational attainment and job mobility of permanent ruralto-urban migrants and compares them with migrants who were born with an urban hukou. Using data from the 2003 China General Social Survey, we examine how much of the gaps in occupational-prestige scores...

This paper investigates the intergenerational effects of education in Japan using a nonparametric bounds approach. The educational levels of parents are considered key factors in explaining children's educational success. Nevertheless, the literature has not reached consensus on the causal...

The decision of whether and how much to borrow from the credit market in order to finance education costs depends crucially on parental investment in education. This study constructs a simple two-period overlapping generations model incorporating both educational investment from parents and...

We examine the effects of local labor market conditions during early pregnancy on birth and later outcomes. Using a longitudinal survey of newborns in Japan, we find that improvements in employment opportunities increase the probability of low birth weight, attributable to shortened gestation....