We use novel high-frequency panel data on individuals' job applications from a job posting website to study how job seekers direct their applications over the course of job search. We find that at the beginning of search, applicants are sorted across vacancies by education. As search continues,...

Potential workers are classified as unemployed if they seek work but are not working. The unemployed population contains two groups - those with jobs and those without jobs. Those with jobs are on furlough or temporary layoff. This group expanded tremendously in April 2020, at the trough of the...

In the U.S. labor market, unemployed individuals who are actively looking for work are more than three times as likely to become employed than those individuals who are not actively looking for work and are considered to be out of the labor force (OLF). Yet, on average, every month twice as many...

We study the paths over time that individuals follow in the labor market, as revealed in the monthly Current Population Survey. Some people face much higher flow values from work than in a non-market activity; if they lose a job, they find another soon. Others have close to equal flow values and...

We use a novel approach to studying the heterogeneity in the job finding rates of the nonemployed by classifying the nonemployed by labor force status (LFS) histories, instead of using only one-month LFS. Job finding rates differ substantially across LFS histories: they are 25-30% among those...