Standard models suggest that adverse labor demand shocks will lead to bigger employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages and trade unions prevent downward wage adjustments. Some economists have argued that this insight explains the contrast between the United States, where real...

The continuing adverse labor market effects of the Great Recession have intensified interest in policy efforts to spur job creation. In periods when labor demand and supply are in balance, either hiring credits or worker subsidies can be used to boost employment - hiring credits by reducing...

The economic convergence of American regions has greatly slowed, and rates of long-term non-employment have even been diverging. Simultaneously, the rate of non-employment for working age men has nearly tripled over the last 50 years, generating a terrible social problem that is...

Using industry-level data disaggregated by states, this paper finds a positive impact of trade liberalization on labor-demand elasticities in the Indian manufacturing sector. These elasticities turn out to be negatively related to protection levels that vary across industries and over time....

We provide a simple explanation for the observation that the variance of job destruction is greater than the variance of job creation: job creation is costlier at the margin than job destruction. As Caballero [2] has argued, asymmetric employment adjustment costs at the establishment level need...

Colombia's unemployment rate rose to 20% during the late 1990s from less than 8% in 1994. This paper argues that this has been the result of high non-wage labor costs embodied in the legislation. The estimated own-wage labor demand elasticity is around 0.5, which implies that a reduction in...

I show that a CES production-function-based approach with skill differentiation and integrated national labor markets has predictions for the employment effect of immigrants at the local level. The model predicts that if I look at the employment (rather than wage) response by skill to...

We estimate a structural model of job assignment in the presence of coordination frictions due to Shimer (2005). The coordination friction model places restrictions on the joint distribution of worker and firm effects from a linear decomposition of log labor earnings. These restrictions permit...

We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms observe failures but only observe successfully resolved crises if they monitor the worker. If...

Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and separations) and job gains and losses at the employer level. Partly motivated by these theories, we exploit establishment-level data from U.S. sources to study the relationship between worker flows...