I estimate the relative magnitudes of worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers. Institutional features imply that voluntary turnover dominates switching in the market for Swedish engineers from 1970--1990. I use data on...

This paper analyzes the linkages among group incentive methods of compensation, labor practices, worker assessments of workplace culture, turnover, and firm performance in a non-representative sample of companies: firms that applied to the "100 Best Companies to Work For in America" competition...

In this paper I explore optimal employment contract design in a random search framework, where workers search on and off the job for employment opportunities similar to that of Lentz (2010) and Bagger and Lentz (2013). The worker determines the frequency by which employment opportunities arrive...

This paper studies wage dispersion in an equilibrium on-the-job-search model with endogenous search intensity. Workers differ in their permanent skill level and firms differ with respect to productivity. Positive (negative) sorting results if the match production function is supermodular...

Churn, defined as replacing departing workers with new ones as workers move to more productive uses, is an important feature of labor dynamics. The majority of hiring and separation reflects churn rather than hiring for expansion or separation for contraction. Using the JOLTS data, we show that...

Theory predicts that mandated employment protections may reduce productivity by distorting production choices. Firms facing (non-Coasean) worker dismissal costs will curtail hiring below efficient levels and retain unproductive workers, both of which should affect productivity. These theoretical...

This paper investigates how job creation and destruction behavior varies by employer size in the U.S. manufacturing sector during the period 1972 to 1988. The paper also evaluates the empirical basis for conventional claims about the job-creating prowess of small businesses. The chief findings...

This paper asks whether startups react more to changing investment opportunities than more mature firms do. We use the fact that a region's pre-existing industrial structure creates exogenous variation in the severity of its exposure to nation-wide manufacturing shocks to develop an instrument...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine retirement and related labor market outcomes for the Early Boomer cohort, those in their mid-fifties at the onset of the Great Recession. Outcomes are then compared with older cohorts at the same age. The Great Recession...

Four years after the beginning of the Great Recession, the labor market remains historically weak. Many observers have concluded that "structural" impediments to recovery bear some of the blame. This paper reviews such structural explanations. I find that there is little evidence supporting...