In this paper we derive a structural measure for labor market density based on the Ellison and Glasear (1997) Index for industry concentration. This labor market density measure serves as a proxy for the number of workers that can reach a certain work area within a reasonal amount of traveling...

The Mortensen-Pissarides model with unemployment benefits and taxes has been able to account for the variation in unemployment rates across countries but does not explain why geographical mobility is very low in some countries (on average, three times lower in Europe than in the U.S.). We build...

This paper provides revealed-preference estimates of the monetary value of avoiding job search in a high-unemployment labor market by examining the behavior of military servicemembers deciding between reenlisting and exiting the military. We find that servicemembers would sacrifice 1.5-2% in...

We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward...

We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward...

The Mortensen-Pissarides model with unemployment benefits and taxes has been able to account for the variation in unemployment rates across countries but does not explain why geographical mobility is very low in some countries (on average, three times lower in Europe than in the U.S.). We build...

We use a novel approach to studying the heterogeneity in the job finding rates of the nonemployed by classifying the nonemployed by labor force status (LFS) histories, instead of using only one-month LFS. Job finding rates differ substantially across LFS histories: they are 25-30% among those...

Most economists maintain that the labor market in the United States is 'tight' because unemployment rates are low. They infer from this that there is potential for wage-push inflation. However, real wages are falling rapidly at present and, prior to that, real wages had been stagnant for some...

We propose using sign restrictions to identify regional labor demand shocks in a panel VAR of US federal states. Observed migration responds significantly, but less persistently than the residual-based migration measure constructed by Blanchard and Katz (1992).