In employment relationships, a wage is an installment payment on an implicit long-term agreement between a worker and a firm. The price of labor that impacts firm's hiring decisions, instead, reflects the hiring wage as well as the impact of economic conditions at the time of hiring on future...

In the U.S. labor market unemployed individuals that are actively looking for work are more than three times as likely to become employed as those individuals that are not actively looking for work and are considered to be out of the labor force (OLF). Yet, on average, every month twice as many...

The user cost of labor captures the hiring wage and the expected effect of the economic conditions at the time of hiring on future wages. In search and matching models, I show that it is the user cost and not the wage that is weighted against the worker's marginal product at the time of hiring;...

I conduct an empirical investigation of the cyclicality of the price of labor. Firms employ workers up to the point where workers' marginal revenue product equals the price of labor. If the labor market is a spot market, then the price of labor is the wage. But often workers are contracted for...

Do large firms and small firms behave differently when credit becomes more costly or harder to obtain? Past research has found that small firms are more likely to be credit-constrained and thus tend to be affected more negatively than large firms during such times. Recent findings from the...