Unemployment increased drastically over the course of the Great Recession from 4.5 percent prior to the recession to 10 percent at its peak in October 2009. Since then, the unemployment rate has come down steadily, and it stood at 5.8 percent in November 2014. Based on existing analyses and some...

Using individual-level Current Population Survey (CPS) data matched across adjacent months from 1996 to 2013, this paper examines immigrant-native differentials in labor market transitions to changes in the business cycle. The paper captures economic fluctuations by measuring deviations in local...

Unemployment insurance schemes face a well-known trade-off between providing income support to those out of work and reducing their incentive to look for work. This trade-off between benefits and incentives is central to the public debate about extending benefit periods during the recent...

Using an international survey that directly assesses the cognitive skills of the adult population, I study the relation between skills and unemployment flows across 37 countries. Depending on the specifically assessed domain, I document that skills have an unconditional correlation with the...

Based on the counting of Help-wanted advertisements in print newspapers, we build national vacancy indexes and vacancy rates for Colombia for the period 1976 - 2012. The result is the first dataset capturing the evolution of vacancies for Colombia and the first one covering such a long period...

An accurate global projection algorithm is critical for quantifying the basic moments of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model. Log linearization under- states the mean and volatility of unemployment, but overstates the volatility of labor market tightness and the magnitude of the...

Unemployment insurance is usually found to show negative effects in the transition from unemployment to a new job. However, the extent to which workers' careers might improve or deteriorate as a result of the unemployment insurance system is not immediately clear. This paper addresses the...

The frequency of labor inspections in Brazil increased in the late 1990s. In the years that followed, between 2003 and 2007, formal employment expanded significantly in the country. This paper examines whether these city-level changes in labor inspections could be a significant factor...

This paper introduces endogenous on-the-job training in the job creation and destruction model of the search and matching type by García-Pérez and Osuna (Dual labour markets and the tenure distribution: Reducing severance pay or introducing a single contract, 2014). The objective is to compare...

This paper develops a sufficient-statistic formula for the unemployment gap-the difference between the actual unemployment rate and the efficient unemployment rate. While lowering unemployment puts more people into work, it forces firms to post more vacancies and to devote more resources to...