Search Results
Working Paper
Job search with bidder memories
This paper revisits the no-recall assumption in job search models with take-it-or-leave-it offers. Workers who can recall previously encountered potential employers in order to engage them in Bertrand bidding have a distinct advantage over workers without such attachments. Firms account for this difference when hiring a worker. When a worker first meets a firm, the firm offers the worker a sufficient share of the match rents to avoid a bidding war in the future. The pair share the gains to trade. In this case, the Diamond paradox no longer holds.
Journal Article
Classifying Worker Types in the U.S. Labor Market
Why some worker types have difficulty finding stable jobs can’t easily be explained by demographic characteristics.
Journal Article
Worker Types, Job Displacement, and Duration Dependence
The composition of the workforce has implications for the earnings consequences of a job loss and patterns in the job-finding rate.
Working Paper
Firm-Worker Matches: Experience or Inspection Goods?
We propose a novel empirical strategy to infer the extent to which firm-worker matches are inspection or experience goods. We argue that the informative content of the signals that firms and workers receive about the productivity of their match before entering an employment relationship can be inferred from the gaps between the separation rates of workers hired from unemployment, employment at low-tenure jobs, and employment at high-tenure jobs. We implement the strategy using German administrative data. We find that, before entering an employment relationship, a firm and a worker receive a ...
Working Paper
The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market
Using a large panel dataset of US workers, we calibrate a search-theoretic model of the labor market, where workers are heterogeneous with respect to the parameters governing their employment transitions. We first approximate heterogeneity with a discrete number of latent types, and then calibrate type-specific parameters by matching type-specific moments. Heterogeneity is well approximated by 3 types: αs, βs and γs. Workers of type α find employment quickly because they have large gains from trade, and stick to their jobs because their productivity is similar across jobs. Workers of type ...
Working Paper
The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market
Using a large panel dataset of US workers, we calibrate a search-theoretic model of the labor market, where workers are heterogeneous with respect to the parameters governing their employment transitions. We first approximate heterogeneity with a discrete number of latent types, and then calibrate type-specific parameters by matching type-specific moments. Heterogeneity is well approximated by 3 types: αs, βs and γs. Workers of type α find employment quickly because they have large gains from trade, and stick to their jobs because their productivity is similar across jobs. Workers of type ...
Working Paper
The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market
We access a long panel dataset of US workers to document the extent to which individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their pattern of transitions across employment states. We find that heterogeneity is well approximated by three latent types: αs, βs and γs. Workers of type α leave unemployment quickly and, once they find a job, they are likely to keep it for more than 2 years. Workers of type γ find employment slowly and, once they do find a job, they are likely to leave it within 1 year. We use our empirical findings to calibrate a search-theoretic model in which workers are ...
Working Paper
The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market
We access a long panel dataset of US workers to document the extent to which individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their pattern of transitions across employment states. We find that heterogeneity is well approximated by three latent types: αs, βs and γs. Workers of type α leave unemployment quickly and, once they find a job, they are likely to keep it for more than 2 years. Workers of type γ find employment slowly and, once they do find a job, they are likely to leave it within 1 year. We use our empirical findings to calibrate a search-theoretic model in which workers are ...
Working Paper
The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market
Based on patterns of employment transitions, we identify three different types of workers in the US labor market: α’s β’s and γ’s. Workers of type α make up over half of all workers, are most likely to remain on the same job for more than 2 years and, when they become unemployed, typically find a new job within 1 quarter. Workers of type γ comprise less than one-fifth of workers, have a low probability of staying on the same job for more than 2 years and, when they become unemployed, face a high probability of remaining jobless for more than 1 year. Workers of type β are in ...
Journal Article
Pandemic Recession: L- or V-Shaped?
We develop and calibrate a search-theoretic model of the labor market in order to forecast the evolution of the aggregate US labor market during and after the coronavirus pandemic. The model is designed to capture the heterogeneity of the transitions of individual workers across states of unemployment and employment and across different employers. The model is designed also to capture the trade-offs in the choice between temporary and permanent layoffs. Under reasonable parametrizations of the model, the lockdown instituted to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus is shown to have ...