Search Results
Conference Paper
Business volatility, job destruction and unemployment
Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent or less by the mid 1990s and thereafter. U.S. data also show a secular decline in firm-level employment volatility and the job destruction rate. We interpret this decline as a decrease in the intensity of idiosyncratic labor demand shocks, a key parameter in search and matching models of frictional unemployment. According to these models, a lower intensity of idiosyncratic demand shocks produces less job destruction, fewer workers flowing through the unemployment pool and less frictional ...
Working Paper
The Intensity of Job Search and Search Duration
We use panel data on individual applications to job openings on a job search website to study search intensity and search duration. Our data allow us to control for the composition of job seekers and changes in the number of available job openings over the duration of search. We find that (1) the number of applications sent by a job seeker declines over the duration of search, and (2) longer-duration job seekers send relatively more applications per week throughout their entire search. The latter finding contradicts the implications of standard labor search models. We argue that these models ...
Journal Article
What Does Online Job Search Tell Us about the Labor Market?
This article finds that in 2011, online job search was much more prevalent and significantly more effective in helping job seekers gain employment than about a decade earlier. Moreover, it shows that online job search data generally capture the aggregate patterns of the U.S. labor market. The authors discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using these data for research, and summarize related studies.
Journal Article
Unemployment among recent veterans during the Great Recession
The authors find that prolonged deployments overseas account for much of the difference in unemployment rates between recent veterans and nonveterans during the Great Recession.
Newsletter
Is there a skills mismatch in the labor market?
This article reviews the concept of skills mismatch in the labor market and examines its role in explaining ongoing low levels of hiring and high levels of unemployment during the current economic recovery.
Newsletter
Job Switching and Wage Growth
This article shows a remarkably strong relationship between job switching and nominal wage growth. We also find a fairly strong relationship between job switching and the cyclical component of inflation. Furthermore, job switching seems to be predictive of both wage growth and inflation.
Newsletter
Wage Growth, Inflation and the Labor Share
The recent pattern of nominal wage growth has been a puzzle to economists, researchers and policymakers because it lies well below the trend wage growth predicted by inflation and productivity growth. We show that the difference can be reconciled by accounting for the labor share of output, which has been on a declining trend for the past 15 years.
Newsletter
How do unemployment benefits relate to job search behavior?
We examine the relationship between unemployment insurance and job search using data from 2013 through 2019. Our research shows that the unemployed exert a high level of effort to find work. This is especially true for those receiving unemployment insurance benefits. Those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits search less intensely for work, but are also willing to accept work that pays considerably less than their prior job.
Newsletter
What Does Everything Besides the Unemployment Rate Tell Us About Labor Market Tightness?
Between March 2022 and June 2023, the unemployment rate, the most commonly used gauge of labor market tightness, remained in a narrow range between 3.4% and 3.7%. Yet, over this period, nominal wage growth increased to unusually high levels and then moderated, though it remains at a historically high rate. The disparity between a relatively constant unemployment rate and large movements in nominal wage growth has led to a divide in public discourse, with some seeing low unemployment and strong wage growth as a sufficient sign of the strength of the labor market and others concerned that the ...
Working Paper
Job Search, Job Amenities, and the Gender Pay Gap
This paper studies gender gaps in labor-market outcomes, with a focus on job ladder dynamics. We show that women experience substantially lower wage growth conditional on prior wages despite nearly identical job-to-job transition rates for men and women. To reconcile these observations, we document gender differences in the valuation of nonwage job amenities and in job search behavior, and develop a multi-dimensional job-ladder model with endogenous search effort where workers value both wages and amenities. The model allows for gender heterogeneity in separation rates, search effort, the ...