We estimate life-cycle transition probabilities between employment, unemployment and inactivity for U.S. workers. We … assess the importance of each worker flow to account for participation and unemployment rates over the life-cycle. We find that … inactivity exit and entry matter, but the empirically relevant margins defy conventional wisdom. High youth unemployment is due …

a high-unemployment urban area carries with it a large welfare penalty. Less stable jobs, slower skill accumulation …. In contrast, several policies that encourage people to move to low-unemployment urban areas increase these welfare losses …

pattern of searchunemployment does not match observed unemployment and we propose a new conceptof 'voluntary' unemployment …

, the model captures the shapes of the empirically observed age profiles of average wages, the unemployment rate, the … unemployment to employment transition rate, and the employment to employment transition rate. …