The earnings of young adults who live in the same neighborhoods as their parents completely recover after a job displacement, unlike the earnings of young adults who live farther away, which permanently decline. Nearby workers appear to benefit from help with childcare since grandmothers are...

This paper explores the role that unobserved heterogeneity within an observed category plays in the dynamics of disaggregate unemployment and in the cross-sectional differences across individuals of the duration of unemployment spells. The distribution of unobserved heterogeneity is...

The underlying data from which the U.S. unemployment rate, labor-force participation rate, and duration of unemployment are calculated contain numerous internal contradictions. This paper catalogs these inconsistencies and proposes a reconciliation. We find that the usual statistics understate...

I propose a new mechanism for sluggish wages based on workers' noisy information about the state of the economy. Wages do not respond immediately to a positive aggregate shock because workers do not (yet) have enough information to demand higher wages. This increases firms' incentives to post...