Previous work has established that recessions involve a “cleansing” effect, so that in downturns, only high productivity jobs remain. But empirical evidence suggests job quality is procyclical: jobs created in recessions are likely to be low-paying and temporary. This paper modifies previous...

This paper shows how record-value theory, a branch of statistics that deals with the timing and magnitude of extreme values in sequences of random variables, can be used to recover features of the wage offer distribution in conventional search models. Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth...

Previous work on information and financial markets has focused on a special set of assumptions: agents have exponential utility, and random variables are normally distributed. These assumptions are often necessary to obtain closed-form solutions. We present an example with alternative...

This paper shows how record-value theory, a branch of statistics that deals with the timing and magnitude of extreme values in sequences of random variables, can be used to recover features of the wage offer distribution in conventional search models. Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth...

Previous work has established that recessions involve a "cleansing" effect, so that in downturns, only high productivity jobs remain. But empirical evidence suggests job quality is procyclical: jobs created in recessions are likely to be low-paying and temporary. This paper modifies previous...