Job search decisions of unemployed workers are forward-looking and respond to expected returns from the search process. When expected returns (or discount rates) are high, the discounted benefits from the search process are low. Thus unemployed workers search less intensively for jobs. We build...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

This paper uses individual-level data linking stock investments to work performance to examine how changes in stock market wealth affect worker output. Exploiting large return variations over time and across investors, we document a 10% increase in monthly stock investment returns is associated...

I establish empirically and theoretically that expectations of returns and cash flows are linked to firms' labor search decisions. Using a dataset that covers the near-universe of online job vacancy postings, I show that vacancy rates negatively predict stock returns and positively predict cash...