This paper presents a theory explaining the labor market matching process through microeconomic incentives. There are heterogeneous variations in the characteristics of workers and jobs, and firms face adjustment costs in responding to these variations. Matches and separations are described...

This paper shows that the matching function and the Beveridge curve in the United States exhibit strong nonlinearities over the business cycle. These patterns can be replicated by enhancing a search and matching model with idiosyncratic productivity shocks for new contacts. Large negative...

This paper shows analytically and numerically that there are two ways of generating an observationally equivalent comovement between matches, unemployment, and vacancies in dynamic labor market models: either by assuming a standard Cobb-Douglas contact function or by combining a degenerate...

Using the new AWFP dataset that covers all German establishments, we document a substantial cross-sectional heterogeneity of establishments' average real wages over the business cycle. While the median establishments' real wages are procyclical, there is a large fraction of establishments with...

In this paper, we analyze the connection between value added, wages, and labor market flows at the establishment level. We develop a simple model to illustrate the expected comovement of these variables. For the empirical analysis, we link the new German Administrative Wage and Labor Market Flow...

Our paper analyzes the role of public employment agencies in job matching, in particular the effects of the restructuring of the Federal Employment Agency in Germany (Hartz III labor market reform) for aggregate matching and unemployment. Based on two microeconomic datasets, we show that the...

This paper shows that the German labor market is more volatile than the US labor market. Specifically, the volatility of the cyclical component of several labor market variables (e.g., the job-finding rate, labor market tightness, and job vacancies) divided by the volatility of labor...

This paper analyzes the effects of different labor market institutions on inflation and output volatility. The eurozone offers an unprecedented experiment for this exercise: since 1999, no national monetary policies have been implemented that could account for volatility differences across...

Firms select not only how many, but also which workers to hire. Yet, in standard search models of the labor market, all workers have the same probability of being hired. We argue that selective hiring crucially affects welfare analysis. Our model is isomorphic to a search model under random...

This paper characterizes efficient labor-market allocations in a labor selection model. The model's crucial aspect is cross-sectional heterogeneity for new job contacts, which leads to an endogenous selection threshold for new hires. With cross-sectional dispersion calibrated to microeconomic...