This paper shows that changes in the skill requirements of jobs are one way by which economic downturns affect job match quality. In doing so this paper makes two contributions to the literature. The first contribution is to document a stylized fact about the cyclicality of skill requirements...

Examples of educational mismatch and overqualifcation in the labour market can often be found in the same office building – the clerical worker with a bachelor’s degree reporting to a manager with a high school education – as an example. Some have argued that mismatch in...

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) is a new data source of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that estimates monthly vacancies, hires, and separations. It has quickly become a useful tool for studying the labor market. This chapter summarizes its aggregate and micro-level evidence,...

This paper evaluates the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that incorporate unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches - the more reduced-form approach of Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) and the...

We develop a theoretical model with labor market frictions, incomplete financial markets and with households which have two members. Households face unemployment risks but their members adjust their labor supplies to insure against unemployment. We use the model to explain the cyclical...

A labor matching model with nominal rigidities can match short-run movements in labor's share with some success. However, it cannot explain much of the behavior of employment, vacancies, and job flows in postwar US data without resorting to additional shocks beyond monetary policy and...

This paper assesses whether labor market frictions, in the form of searching and matching, can help explain movements in the labor wedge - the gap between the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) and the marginal productivity of labor in a perfectly competitive business cycle model. Results...

This paper proposes an empirical method for estimating a long-run trend for the unemployment rate that is grounded in the modern theory of unemployment. I write down an unobserved components model and identify the cyclical and trend components of the underlying unemployment flows, which in turn...

We develop a theoretical model with labor market frictions, incomplete financial markets and with households which have two members. Households face unemployment risks but their members adjust their labor supplies to insure against unemployment. We use the model to explain the cyclical...

This paper evaluates the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that incorporate unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches - the more reduced-form approach of Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) and the...