In April 2016, Professor Orly Lobel delivered the 12th Annual Pemberton Lecture at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Lobel asks, what is the future of employment and labor law protections when reality is rapidly transforming the ways we work? What is the status of gig work and what are the...

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...

This paper proves that the Mortensen-Pissarides matching theory is nothing but a tautology. They started with an assumption and ended with the same as solution. Their assumption/solution is also at odds with the Beveridge, or the negative vacancy-unemployment relation

Economic growth is driven by structural change. Structural change does not come without a cost, the most evident social cost being high and persistent unemployment. This paper develops an economy with an endogenously expanding service sector, where the constant flow of workers in and out of...

This paper expands on the methodology of Groshen and Potter (2003) for studying cyclical and structural changes in the US economy and analyzes the net structural and cyclical employment trends in the US economy during the last 10 trough-to-trough business cycles from 1949 to the present. It...

This paper explores the relationship between growth and unemployment. Knowledge formation is the source of growth, which includes the two dimensions technologies and skills. Both are connected through a technology-skill complementarity which may have limiting effects on the reallocation of labor...

This chapter for the Encyclopedia of Labor and Employment Law and Economics, discusses government regulation of the labor market in the 21st Century, with a particular emphasis on the need to maintain competitiveness in an era of globalization. The chapter first considers the 'race to the...

Traditional law and economic analysis views postemployment restrictions, ranging from noncompete agreements to intellectual property controls over an ex-employee’s knowledge and skill, as necessary for economic investment and market growth. The orthodox economic analysis theorizes that without...

This paper studies the impact of long-run productivity growth on job finding and separation rates, and thus the unemployment rate, using a search and matching model. We incorporate disembodied technological progress and on-the-job search into the endogenous job separation model of Mortensen and...

Making use of an international survey that directly assesses the participants' cognitive skills, I study the effect of skills on employment in 32 countries. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 8.4 percentage-point increase in the probability of...