This paper considers a matching model in which multiple steady-state unemployment rates exist if government expenditures and unemployment benefits are high enough. The focus on the extensive margin and a possible transition to a steady state with higher unemployment rates imply that the effect...

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...

study the efficiency of search equilibrium under decreasing returns to labor in production. Firms can sign long-term contracts with their workers which give them incentives to maximize the joint surplus associated with their relationship. When the firm hires a new worker, the terms of the...

In many search models of the labor market, unemployment insurance (UI) is conveniently interpreted as the value of leisure or home production and is, therefore, treated as a parameter. However, in reality, UI has to be funded through taxation that might be distortionary. In this paper, I analyze...

The same high labor supply elasticity that characterizes a representative family model with indivisible labor and employment lotteries can also emerge without lotteries when self-insuring individuals choose career lengths. Off corners, the more elastic the earnings profile is to accumulated...

Do fluctuations of the labor wedge, defined as the gap between the firm's marginal product of labor (MPN) and the household's marginal rate of substitution (MRS), reflect fluctuations of the gap between the MPN and the real wage or fluctuations of the gap between the real wage and the MRS? For...

This paper examines the importance of ex-ante heterogeneity for understanding the relationship between wealth and labor supply when markets are incomplete. An infinite horizon model is estimated where labor supply is indivisible and households are ex-ante heterogeneous in their labor disutility...