Search Results
Working Paper
Costly Commuting and the Job Ladder
Even though workers in the UK spent just 1,000 pounds on commuting in 2017, the economic loss may be far higher because of the congestion externality arising from the way in which one worker's commute affects the commuting time of others. I provide empirical evidence that commuting time affects job acceptance, pointing to large indirect costs of congestion. To interpret the empirical facts and quantify the costs of congestion, I build a model featuring a frictional labor market within a metropolitan area. By endogenizing commuting congestion in a labor search model, the model connects labor ...
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.
Working Paper
Interactions between job search and housing decisions: a structural estimation
In this paper, we investigate to what extent shocks in housing and financial markets account for wage and employment variations in a frictional labor market. To explain these interactions, we use a model of job search with accumulation of wealth as liquid funds and residential real estate, in which house prices are randomly persistent. First, we show that reservation wages and unemployment are increasing in total wealth. And, second, we show that reservation wages and unemployment are also responsive to the composition of wealth. Specifically, when house prices are expected to rise, holding a ...
Working Paper
Can Reputation Discipline the Gig Economy? Experimental Evidence from an Online Labor Market
Just as employers face uncertainty when hiring workers, workers also face uncertainty when accepting employment, and bad employers may opportunistically depart from expectations, norms, and laws. However, prior research in economics and information sciences has focused sharply on the employer?s problem of identifying good workers rather than vice versa. This issue is especially pronounced in markets for gig work, including online labor markets, where platforms are developing strategies to help workers identify good employers. We build a theoretical model for the value of such reputation ...
Working Paper
Network Search: Climbing the Job Ladder Faster
We introduce an irregular network structure into a model of frictional, on-the-job search in which workers find jobs through their network connections or directly from firms. We show that jobs found through network search have wages that stochastically dominate those found through direct contact. Because we consider irregular networks, heterogeneity in the worker's position within the network leads to heterogeneity in wage and employment dynamics: better connected workers climb the job ladder faster and do not fall off it as far. These workers also pass along higher quality referrals, which ...