We develop a model in which competition in the labor market may produce worker-firm matches that are inferior to those obtained in the absence of competition. This result contrasts with the conventional wisdom that competition among employers allocates scarce talent efficiently. In a model in...

In the United States, many laid-off workers are recalled to their former employer. I develop an asymmetric information model of layoffs in which high productivity workers are more likely to be recalled and may choose to remain unemployed rather than accept a low-wage job. In this case,...

This paper studies the cyclical dynamics of Mortensen and Pissarides' (1994) model of job creation and destruction when workers' effort is not perfectly observable, as in Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984). An occasionally-binding no-shirking constraint truncates the real wage distribution from below,...