How much of a worker's lifetime experience in the labor market is due to human capital accumulation versus luck? We build a life-cycle model of directed search in the labor market, in which workers move between the states of unemployment, employment and across employers because of differences in...

TBD

We develop a theory of endogenous and stochastic fluctuations in economic activity. Individual firms choose to randomize over firing or keeping workers who performed poorly in the past to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Different firms choose to correlate the outcome of their...