We show that time-varying risk premium in financial markets can explain a key yet puzzling feature of labor markets: the large differences in unemployment risk across worker age-groups over the business cycle. Our search model features a time-varying risk premium and learning about unobserved...

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...

We analyze the general equilibrium effects of countercyclical unemployment benefit policies. Our heterogenous-agent model features costly job search with imperfect insurance of unemployment risk and individual savings. Our model predicts: (1) the additional unemployment under a countercyclical...

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...

We analyze the consequences of ambiguity aversion in the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) search and matching model. Our model features a cross-section of workers whose productivity is the sum of an aggregate and a match-specific component. Firms are ambiguity averse towards match-specific...

This paper estimates an identified VAR on US data to gauge the dynamic response of the job finding rate, the worker separation rate, and vacancies to monetary policy shocks. I develop a general equilibrium model that can account for the large and persistent responses of vacancies, the job...

This paper extends Shimer's (2005) Mismatch model to allow for endogenous mobility. Rather than work directly in the original model, I use a related framework, the stock-flow matching model (Taylor, 1995; Coles and Muthoo, 1998). One of the contributions of this paper is therefore to compare the...

Shimer (2005) showed that a standard search and matching model of the labor market fails to generate fluctuations of unemployment and vacancies of the magnitude observed in US data in response to shocks to average labor productivity of plausible magnitude. He also suggested that wage...