Does the search and matching model fit aggregate U.S. labor market data? While the model has become an important tool of macroeconomic analysis, recent literature pointed to some significant failures in accounting for the data. This paper aims to answer two questions: (i) Does the model fit the...

The decisions of firms on investment and hiring play a crucial role in business cycle fluctuations. This paper explores their dynamic behavior in the presence of frictions. It does so within a unified framework, stressing their mutual dependence and placing the emphasis on their joint,...

U.S. CPS gross flows data indicate that in recessions firms actually increase their hiring rates from the pools of the unemployed and out of the labor force. Why so? The paper provides an explanation by studying the optimal recruiting behavior of the representative firm. This behavior is a...

We document that fluctuations in part-time employment play a major role in movements in hours per worker, especially during cyclical swings in the labor market. Building on this result, we propose a novel representation of the intensive margin based on a stock-flow framework. The evolution of...

This paper provides a unified account of the trends in unemployment and labor force participation pertaining to the employment experience of older male workers during the past half-century. We build an equilibrium life-cycle model with labor-market frictions and an operative labor supply margin,...

This paper studies the effects of mass immigration from the former USSR to Israel in the 1990s on the employment of the native-born. The exogeneity and the size of this inflow make it a "natural experiment" of macroeconomic proportions. An open-economy macroeconomic model is used to analyze this...

This paper studies optimal UI policy from the perspective of worker assignment to heterogenous jobs in an environment of random matching. Workers react to UI policy through job acceptance decisions; firms react to UI policy through wage posting. There is endogenous assortative matching as a...

We propose a model to evaluate the U.K.'s zero-hours contract (ZHC) - a contract that exempts employers from the requirement to provide any minimum working hours, and allows employees to decline any workload. We find quantitatively that ZHCs improve welfare by enabling firms with more volatile...

We match cell phone data to administrative school records and combine it with information on school learning modes to study effective in-person learning (EIPL) in the U.S. during the pandemic. We find large differences in EIPL for the 2020-21 school year. Public schools averaged less EIPL than...

The U.S. labor market experienced a more than 20 percent reduction in the share of workers holding multiple jobs over the past 20 years. While this substantial trend is receiving increasing attention, the literature lacks a comprehensive picture of the gross worker flows that underlie the...