Two thirds of US unemployment volatility is due to fluctuations in workers' job finding rate. In search and matching models, aggregate productivity shocks generate such fluctuations: through firms recruiting effort, they affect the rate at which workers and firms come into contact....

I document that workers in newly tradable service occupations possess more occupation-specific human capital and are more highly educated than workers in previously tradable occupations. Motivated by this observation, I develop a dynamic equilibrium model with labor market frictions and specific...

This paper demonstrates that in a free entry search and bargaining economy with concave production firms over-employ. Bargaining allows the worker's wage to depend upon marginal productivity. As such, with strictly concave production, the wage declines as firms employ more labour. Firms react to...

In this study, we explore the effects of a change in unskilled labor in China on the direction of innovation in the US by incorporating production offshoring into a North-South model of directed technical change. We find that intellectual property rights (IPRs) and offshoring are different ways...

This paper studies the effects of import-price shocks on measured output and productivity in a standard small open economy model and quantifies such effects in the case of the Korean crisis of 1997-98. I argue that it is the price of imported goods relative to the price of domestic goods but not...

There is a large body of evidence indicating that cross-country differences in income levels are associated with differences in productivity. If workers are much more productive in one country than in another, restrictions on immigration lead to large efficiency losses. The paper quantifies...

This paper modifies the standard one-sector stochastic growth model in an effort to explain the observed low procyclicality of the aggregate real wage in the US. The modifications include labor market matching with Nash-bargaining of wages and preferences as introduced in the literature by...

We study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage in light of changing divorce laws during the 1970s. We build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women...

Why are financial crises associated with a sustained rise in unemployment? We develop a tractable model with frictions in both credit and labor markets to study the aggregate andmicro-level implications of a credit crunch---i.e., a sudden tightening of collateral constraints. When we simulate a...

We develop a life-cycle model of the labor market in which different worker-firm matches have different quality and the assignment of the right workers to the right firms is time consuming because of search and learning frictions. The rate at which workers move between unemployment, employment...