Search Results
Working Paper
The Evolution of Regional Beveridge Curves
The slow recovery of the labor market in the aftermath of the Great Recession highlighted mismatch, the misallocation of workers across space or across industries. We consider the historical evolution of regional mismatch. We construct MSA-level unemployment rates and vacancy data using techniques similar to Barnichon (2010) and a new dataset of online help-wanted ads by MSA. We estimate regional Beveridge curves, identifying the slopes by restricting them to be equal across locations with similar labor market characteristics. We find that the 51 U.S. cities in our sample have four groupings ...
Working Paper
The Intensity of Job Search and Search Duration
We use micro data on applications to job openings by individuals on a job search website to study the relationship between search intensity and search duration. Our data allow us to control for several factors that can affect the measured relationship between intensity and duration, including the composition of job seekers and changes in the number of available job openings over the duration of search. We find that a job seeker sends fewer applications per week as search continues. We also find that job seekers who search on the website longer tend to send more applications in every period. ...
Working Paper
The Dual Beveridge Curve
When firms decide to post a vacancy they can hire from the pool of unemployed workers or they can poach a worker from another firm. In this paper we show that if there are two different matching processes, one for unemployed workers and another one for job-to-job transitions, then implications for the Beveridge curve are potentially very different, influencing the effects of monetary policy on unemployment. We show that over the years the hiring process and how job postings are used as an input into this process has changed dramatically.
Working Paper
VACANCY CHAINS
Replacement hiring—recruitment that seeks to replace positions vacated by workers who quit—plays a central role in establishment dynamics. We document this phenomenon using rich microdata on U.S. establishments, which frequently report no net change in their employment, often for years at a time, despite facing substantial gross turnover in the form of quits. We propose a model in which replacement hiring is driven by the presence of a putty-clay friction in the production structure of establishments. Replacement hiring induces a novel positive feedback channel through which an initial ...
Journal Article
Hybrid Work May Pose Challenge to Bars and Restaurants in Parts of the Tenth Federal Reserve District
As remote or hybrid work continues to be popular, office attendance has fallen. Less in-person work may increase office vacancy rates and reduce foot traffic to other businesses located in office-dense areas. Compared with the national average, most states in the Tenth Federal Reserve District have a lower share of office space in office-dense areas, but some of these areas have a higher share of bars and restaurants. The outlook for these businesses may depend on how foot traffic within office-dense areas evolves.
Working Paper
Vacancy Chains
Replacement hiring—recruitment that seeks to replace positions vacated by workers who quit—plays a central role in establishment dynamics. We document this phenomenon using rich microdata on U.S. establishments, which frequently report no net change in their employment, often for years at a time, despite facing substantial gross turnover in the form of quits. We devise a tractable model in which replacement hiring is driven by a novel structure of frictions, combining firm dynamics, on-the-job search, and investments into job creation that are sunk at the point of replacement. A key ...
Does Employers’ Worker Poaching Explain the Beveridge Curve’s Odd Behavior?
Increased worker job-hopping may help explain the odd-shaped post-COVID Beveridge curve and the underlying employment behavior it depicts.
Working Paper
The Dual Beveridge Curve
The recent behavior of the Beveridge Curve has been puzzling, significantly differs from past recessions, and is hard to explain with traditional gradual changes in fundamentals. We propose a novel dual-vacancy model that rationalizes this recent puzzling behavior, by acknowledging that not all vacancies are made equal—when firms post a vacancy they can fill it with an unemployed worker or they can fill it with an already employed worker—and by assuming that there are two separate search and matching processes, one for unemployed workers and another for the employed workers. By analyzing ...
Working Paper
Interregional Migration and Housing Vacancy: Theory and Empirics
We examine homeowner vacancy rate interdependencies over time and space through the channel of migration. Our theoretical analysis extends the Wheaton (1990) search and matching model for housing by incorporating interregional spillovers due to some households’ desires to migrate between regions and by allowing for regime-switching behavior. Our empirical analysis of vacancy rates for the entire U.S. and for Census regions provides visual evidence for the possibility of regime-switching behavior. We explicitly test our model by estimating basic Vector Autoregression (VAR) and ...
Working Paper
Upskilling: do employers demand greater skill when skilled workers are plentiful?
The Great Recession and subsequent recovery have been particularly painful for low-skilled workers. From 2007 to 2012, the unemployment rate rose by 6.4 percentage points for noncollege workers while it rose by only 2.3 percentage points for the college educated. This differential impact was evident within occupations as well. One explanation for the differential impact may be the ability of highly skilled workers to take middle- and low-skilled jobs. Indeed, over this period the share of workers with a college degree in traditionally middle-skill occupations increased rapidly. Such growth in ...