Wage inequality in the United States has grown substantially in the past two decades. Standard supply-demand analysis in the empirics of inequality (e.g.Katz and Murphy (1992)) indicates that we may attribute some of this trend to an outward shift in the demand for high skilled labor. In this...

We develop an equilibrium search-matching model with risk-neutral agents and two-sided ex-ante heterogeneity. Unemployment insurance has the standard effect of reducing employment, but also helps workers to get a suitable job. The predictions of our simple model are consistent with the...

In this paper, we incorporate a positive theory of unemployment insurance into a dynamic overlapping generations model with search-matching frictions and on-the-job learning-by-doing. The model shows that societies populated by identical rational agents, but differing in the initial distribution...

A new model of wage dispersion is used to examine welfare aspects of income taxation. The model retains the dynamics of wage posting models while exogenizing search e¤ort, therefore allowing more insight into policy issues. The results highlight effects that standard analyses do not take into...

We generalize the Mortensen-Pissarides (1994) model of the labor market with a more realistic structure for the stochastic process of the shocks to the worker-firm match. In this way we can acommodate the empirical observation that hazard rates of job termination decrease and average wages...

We propose a stylized model of a problem-solving organization whose internal communication structure is given by a fixed network. Problems arrive randomly anywhere in this network and must find their way to their respective “specialized solvers” by relying on local information alone. The...

Four general equilibrium search models are compared quantitatively. The baseline framework is a calibrated macroeconomic model of the US economy designed for a welfare analysis of unemployment insurance policy. The other models make three simple and natural specification changes, regarding tax...

This paper provides a search theoretical model that captures two phenomena that have characterized several episodes of monetary history: currency shortages and the circulation of privately issued notes. As usual in these models, the media of exchange are determined as part of the equilibrium. We...