In the present paper, I integrate frictional labor markets with on-the-job search into an otherwise standard heterogeneous firm model of intra-industry trade. Most importantly, I show that the returns to workers' inter-firm mobility are higher in a trade equilibrium than in autarky. Intuitively,...

Recent studies document a decline in U.S. labor-market fluidity from as early as the 1970s on. Making use of the Annual Social and Economic (ASEC) supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), I uncover a pronounced increase in job-to-job mobility from the 1970s to the 1990s, i.e., the...

Making use of a survey that directly assesses the participants' cognitive skills, I study the relation between skills and job mobility in a large international comparison of 32 countries. Motivated by the canonical on-the-job search model, I measure job mobility by the ratio of the job-finding...

Making use of an international survey that directly assess the cognitive skills of the adult population, I document systematic differences in the effect of skills on job mobility across the 37 countries in the sample. While economic growth is associated with relatively higher job mobility among...

In this paper I illustrate how the diffusion across firms of a skill-neutral technology leads to a skill-biased impact on the economy. The model identifies (i) differences in inter-firm mobility between skill groups, (ii) productivity dispersion across firms within industries, and (iii)...

Motivated by the canonical (random) on-the-job search model, I measure a person’s ability to sort into preferred jobs by the risk ratio of job-to-job transitions to transitions into unemployment. I show that this measure possesses various desirable features. Making use of the Survey of Income...

Using an international survey that directly assesses the cognitive skills of the adult population, I study the relation between skills and unemployment flows across 37 countries. Depending on the specifically assessed domain, I document that skills have an unconditional correlation with the...