This paper assesses the trade-off between acquiring specialized skills targeted for a particular occupation and acquiring a package of skills that diversifies risk across occupations. Individual-level data on college credits across subjects and labor-market dynamics reveal that diversification...

Higher oil price shocks benefit unskilled workers relative to skilled workers: Over the business cycle, energy prices and the skill premium display a strong negative correlation. This correlation is robust to different detrending procedures. We construct and estimate a model economy with energy...

This paper investigates the change in wages associated with a spell of unemployment. The novelty lies in using monthly data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to analyze the dynamics of those wage changes across different business cycles. The level of education or the...

Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we document a significant and positive association between earnings risk (both permanent and transitory) and the level of earnings across 21 industries. We propose an equilibrium framework to analyze the interplay between earnings...

This paper investigates the change in wages associated with a spell of unemployment. The novelty lies in using monthly data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to analyze the dynamics of those wage changes across different business cycles. The level of education or the...

Over the business cycle, labor's share of output is negatively but weakly correlated with output, and it lags output by about four quarters. Profit's share is strongly procyclical. It neither leads nor lags output, and its volatility is about four times that of output. Despite the importance of...

Common practice in the housing and wealth distribution literature has proceeded as if the modeling of housing rental markets was unnecessary due to renters’ relative low levels of wealth and the small fraction they represent in the total population. This paper shows, however, that their...

This paper is concerned with the business cycle dynamics in search-and-matching models of the labor market when agents are ex post heterogeneous. We focus on wealth heterogeneity that comes as a result of imperfect opportunities to insure against idiosyncratic risk. We show that this...

In “Capital-Skill Complementarity and Inequality: A Macroeconomic Analysis,” Krusell et al. (2000) analyzed the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis as an explanation for the behavior of the U.S. skill premium. This paper shows that their model’s fit and the values of the estimated...

This paper constructs a theory of the coexistence of fixed-term and permanent employment contracts in an environment with ex ante identical workers and employers. Workers under fixed-term contracts can be dismissed at no cost while permanent employees enjoy labor protection. In a labor market...