According to search and matching theory, a greater availability of unemployed workers should make it easier for a firm to fill a vacancy but more vacancies at other firms should make recruitment more difficult. But what can we say about the expected magnitudes of these effects on firms’...

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model - even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated. We argue that one source of the wage...

Unemployment in the U.S. has risen dramatically since the start of the recession in December 2007, going from about 6.8 million people in May 2007 to over 14.6 million in June 2010. This is often spoken of as "losing 7.8 million jobs," but this is a terribly misleading view of the issue. The...

This paper studies the quantitative properties of a multiple-worker firm matching model with on-the-job search where heterogeneous firms operate decreasing-returns-to-scale production technology. The authors focus on the model's ability to replicate the business cycle features of job flows,...

Studies that incorporate endogenous labor force participation, and search and matching frictions in a real business cycle model nd that this three state model generates counterfactual results: labor force participation is very volatile, unemployment is acyclical and highly positively correlated...

Theoretical work on minimum wage policy emphasizes labor market dynamics, but the resulting implications for worker mobility remain largely untested. We show that in the teenage labor market minimum wages reduce worker flows and increase job stability. Furthermore, we find that the employment...

Worker flows and job flows behave differently over the business cycle. We investigate the sources of the differences by studying quantitative properties of a multiple-worker version of the search/matching model that features endogenous job separation and intra-firm wage bargaining. Our...

We analyze changes in unemployment, marginal labor force attachment and participation in Canada and the U.S.. Using two complementary decompositions, we show the importance for the comparative evolution of aggregate unemployment of changes in the fraction of the non-employed who are unemployed...

We analyze changes in unemployment, marginal labor force attachment and participation in Canada and the U.S. Using two complementary decompositions, we show the importance for the comparative evolution of aggregate unemployment of changes in the fraction of the non-employed who are unemployed...

We estimate trends in the labor force participation (LFP) and unemployment rates for demographic groups differentiated by age, gender, and education, using a parsimonious statistical model of age, cohort and cycle effects. Based on the group trends, we construct trends for the aggregate LFP and...