We evaluate the impacts of a randomized job-fair intervention in which jobseekers and employers can meet at low cost. The intervention generates few hires, but it lowers participants' expectations and causes both firms and workers to invest more in search as predicted by a theoretical model;...

We study optimal unemployment insurance (UI) over the business cycle using a heterogeneous agent job search model with aggregate risk and incomplete markets. We validate the model-implied micro and macro labor market elasticities to changes in UI generosity against existing estimates, and...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the division of labour among parents of school-aged children in two-parent opposite-gender families. In line with existing evidence, we find that mothers' paid work took a larger hit than that of fathers, and...

In this work we solve in a closed form the problem of an agent who wants to optimise the inter-temporal utility of both his consumption and leisure by choosing: (i) the optimal inter-temporal consumption, (ii) the optimal inter-temporal labour supply, (iii) the optimal share of wealth to invest...

Policy-makers have increasingly turned to ‘in-work transfers’ to boost incomes among poorer workers and strengthen work incentives. One attraction of these is that labour supply elasticities are typically greatest at the extensive margin. Because in-work transfers are normally subject to...

We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...

The Great Recession, which was preceded by the financial crisis, resulted in higher unemployment and inequality. We propose a simple model where firms producing varieties face labor-market frictions and credit constraints. In the model, tighter credit leads to lower output, lower number of...

The costs of searching for a job vacancy are typically associated with friction that deters or delays employment of potentially productive individuals. We demonstrate that in a labor market with moral hazard where effort is noncontractible, job search costs play a positive role, whose effect may...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model - even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated. We argue that one source of the wage...

We re-examine the impact of environmental taxation on health and output, in the presence of labor market frictions. Our main findings are that matching process and wage bargaining introduce new channels of transmission of environmental taxation on the economy such that assuming perfect labor...