Why do young firms pay less? Using confidential microdata from the US Census Bureau, we find lower earnings among workers at young firms. However, we argue that such measurement is likely subject to worker and firm selection. Exploiting the two-sided panel nature of the data to control for...

Standard New Keynesian (NK) models feature an optimal inflation target well below two percent, limited welfare losses from business cycle fluctuations and long-term monetary neutrality. We develop a NK framework with labour market frictions, endogenous productivity and downward wage rigidity...

Worker on-the-job behavior has been largely, and curiously, ignored in mainstream economic theory. This paper corrects that deficiency, constructing a workplace model motivated by utility- and profit-optimization and focused on price-mediated exchange. The analysis critically accommodates...

A model of nominal labor-price dynamics is derived from the choice of an efficient strategy to adjust wages for inflation. The model, named the rational-arrangements Phillips curve, identifies a central role for catch-up to price inflation that has already occurred and a more latent role for...

Using two decades of annual data, we explore the links between real exchange rates and employment, wages, and overtime activity in specific U.S. manufacturing industries. Across two-digit industry levels of aggregation, exchange rate movements do not have large effects on numbers of jobs or on...

Using UK employer-employee panel data, we present novel facts on how wages and working hours respond to the business cycle within jobs. Firms reacted to the Great Recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part-time workers. A one percentage point increase in the...

Young and small firms are typically matched with younger and nonemployed individuals, and they provide these workers with lower earnings compared to other firms. To explore the mechanisms behind these facts, a dynamic model of entrepreneurship is introduced, where individuals can choose not to...

Young and small firms are typically matched with younger and nonemployed individuals, and they provide these workers with lower earnings compared to other firms. To explore the mechanisms behind these facts, a dynamic model of entrepreneurship is introduced, where individuals can choose not to...

This paper presents a compact economic model of optimizing workplace behavior, an important but overlooked venue of exchange that provides the missing half of morale-centric efficiency-wage theory. First appearing in the formal literature more than 30 years ago, the great promise of efficiency...

We read search theory's unemployment equilibrium condition as an Iso-Unemployment Curve(IUC).The IUC is the locus of job destruction rates and expected unemployment durations rendering the same unemployment level. A country's position along the curve reveals its preferences over the...