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...

The distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell-dependent unemployment benefits displays a time-varying exit rate. Building on Semi-Markov processes, we translate these exit rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate. Structural estimation...

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...

This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using high‐frequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self‐reported...

We develop and estimate a non-stationary job search model to evaluate a scheme that monitors job search effort and sanctions insured unemployed whose effort is deemed insufficient. The model reveals that such schemes provide incentives to the unemployed to front-load search effort prior to...

Standard search models are unreliable for structural inference of the underlying sources of wage inequality because they are inconsistent with observed residual wage dispersion. We address this issue by modeling skill development and duration dependence in unemployment benefits in a random on...

We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job-seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job-seekers made. From the data and the model, we identify the distributions of four key variables:...

We introduce different skill groups and production functions into the Burdett-Mortensen equilibrium search model. Supermodularity in the production process leads to a positive intrafirm wage correlation between skill groups. Theory implies that increasing returns to scale can lead to a unimodal...