The negative relationship between the unemployment rate and the job openings rate, known as the Beveridge curve, has been relatively stable in the U.S. over the last decade. Since the summer of 2009, in spite of firms reporting more job openings, the U.S. unemployment rate has not declined in...

In this paper I determine the importance of adjustment costs in employers' hiring decisions. Temporary work arrangements offer potential ways to avoid adjustment costs. I estimate employers willingness to pay for the characteristics of these work arrangements. I distinguish regular contracts,...

We analyze a general search model with on-the-job search and sorting of heterogeneous workers into heterogeneous jobs. This model yields a simple relationshipbetween (i) the unemployment rate, (ii) the value of non-market time, and (iii) themax-mean wage differential. The latter measure of wage...

An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

In this paper we study the allocation of workers over high and low productivity firms in a labor market with coordination frictions. Specifically, we consider a search model where workers can apply to high and or low productivity firms. Firms that compete for the same candidate can increase...

This paper characterizes the equilibrium for a large class of search models with two-sided heterogeneity and on-the-job search. Besides the well-known congestion externalities, we show that on-the-job search in combination with monopsonistic wage setting without commitment creates a...

This paper first documents the increase in the time lag with which labor input reacts to output fluctuations (the labor adjustment lag) that is visible in US data since the mid-1980s. We show that a lagged labor adjustment response is optimal in a setting where there is uncertainty about the...

With China's 2001 WTO accession, trade costs between the US and China fell sharply, but the transport costs of Chinese imports within the US remained sizable. We argue that domestic transport costs shield local labor markets from globalization. Using a shift-share design for industry-level...

A wide class of models with On-the-Job Search (OJS) predicts that workers gradually select into better-paying jobs, until lay-off occurs, when this selection process starts over from scratch. We develop a simple methodology to test these predictions. Our inference uses two sources of...