We provide a new theory to explain why firms multitask workers rather than specializing them. Workers over-perform in tasks they like and under-perform in tasks they dislike, to favorably influence future job assignments. Anticipating this, firms may find it optimal to commit to future...

We provide a new theory to explain why firms multitask workers rather than specializing them. Workers over-perform in tasks they like and under-perform in tasks they dislike, to favorably influence future job assignments. Anticipating this, firms may find it optimal to commit to future...

This paper studies the role of worker learning in a labor market where workers have incomplete information about the quality of their employment match. The amount of information about the quality of a new match depends on a worker’s past job experience. Allowing workers to learn from...

In this paper, I estimate a series of long run reallocative shocks to sectoral employment using a stochastic volatility model of sectoral employment growth for the United States from 1960 through 2011. Reallocative shocks (which primarily measure construction and technology busts) have little...

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...