This paper models a firm's choice of employment adjustment costs as one component of its choice of production process. In making a one-time choice of production process, firms tradeoff increased flexibility--the reduced cost of changing levels of production--against the diminished efficiency of...

I derive measures of U.S. job-separation and job-matching rates from aggregate Current Population Survey data. Using an unrestricted unobserved-components approach, I decompose these series into trends and cycles and compare the results with the trend and cyclical behavior of labor-productivity...

We study inferences about the dynamics of labor adjustment obtained by the "gap methodology" of Caballero and Engel [1993] and Caballero, Engel and Haltiwanger [1997]. In that approach, the policy function for employment growth is assumed to depend on an unobservable gap between the target and...

This paper controls for the selection bias associated with occupational choice and the labor force participation decision in estimating the wage penalty for working in female-dominated occupations. Using data from the May 1979 and the April 1993 supplements to the Current Population Survey, the...

A study of whether changes in unionism affect the aggregate level of employment in the economy and, in particular, whether an individual who lives in an SMSA where unions are weak is more likely to be employed than an individual who lives in an area where unions are strong.

During periods of slow job growth, some economic analysts look to the Conference Board's help-wanted ad index as a harbinger of future jobs and economic activity.

If today's tight labor market in the Midwest can be sustained, as now seems likely, the region's policymakers and businesses will face problems associated with labor-constrained growth rather than the underemployment of the recent past. An era of tight labor markets can be expected to add...