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Working Paper
Unemployment Insurance during a Pandemic
The CARES Act implemented in response to the COVID-19 crisis dramatically increases the generosity of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, triggering concerns about its substantial impact on unemployment. This paper combines a labor market search-matching model with the SIR-type infection dynamics to study the effects of CARES UI on both unemployment and infection. More generous UI policies create work disincentives and lead to higher unemployment, but they also reduce infection and save lives. Economic shutdown policies further amplify these effects of UI policies. Quantitatively, the CARES ...
Working Paper
The Liquidity Effects of Official Bond Market Intervention
To "ensure depth and liquidity," the European Central Bank in 2010 and 2011 repeatedly intervened in sovereign debt markets through its Securities Markets Programme. These purchases provide a unique natural experiment for testing the effects of large-scale asset purchases on risk premia arising from liquidity concerns. To explore how official intervention influences liquidity premia, we develop a search-based asset-pricing model. Consistent with our model's predictions, we find statistically and economically significant stock and flow effects on sovereign bonds' liquidity premia in response ...
Working Paper
Worker flows and job flows: a quantitative investigation
This paper studies quantitative properties of a multiple-worker firm search/matching model and investigates how worker transition rates and job flow rates are interrelated. We show that allowing for job-to-job transitions in the model is essential to simultaneously account for the cyclical features of worker transition rates and job flow rates. Important to this result are the distinctions between the job creation rate and the hiring rate and between the job destruction rate and the layoff rate. In the model without job-to-job transitions, these distinctions essentially disappear, thus making ...
Working Paper
Declining Labor Turnover and Turbulence
(supersedes WP 15-29)The rate of job loss has been on a secular decline for the last four decades or longer. Changes in demographics or industry composition do not account for the trend. This paper seeks to identify possible sources of this decline using a simple labor matching model with two types of workers, experienced and inexperienced, where the former type faces a risk of skill loss during unemployment. When the skill loss occurs, the worker is required to restart his career and thus suffers a drop in his wage. I show that a higher risk of skill loss results in a lower job separation ...
Working Paper
Sectoral Shocks, Reallocation, and Labor Market Policies
Unemployment insurance and wage subsidies are key tools to support labor markets in recessions. We develop a multi-sector search and matching model with on-the-job human capital accumulation to study labor market policy responses to sector-specific shocks. Our calibration accounts for structural differences in labor markets between the United States and the euro area, including a lower job-finding rate in the latter. We use the model to evaluate unemployment insurance and wage subsidy policies in recessions of different duration. We find that, after a temporary sector-specific shock, ...
Working Paper
National and Regional Housing Vacancy: Insights Using Markov-switching Models
We examine homeowner vacancy rates over time and space using Markov-switching models. Our theoretical analysis extends the Wheaton (1990) search and matching model for housing by incorporating regime-switching behavior and interregional spillovers. Our approach is strongly supported by our empirical results. Estimations, using constant-only as well as Vector Autoregressions, allow us to examine differences in vacancy rates as well as explore the possibility of asymmetries within and across housing markets, depending on the state/regime (e.g., low or high vacancy) of a given housing market. ...
Working Paper
Leveraging the Disagreement on Climate Change: Theory and Evidence
We theoretically and empirically investigate how climate risks affect collateralized debt markets. First, we develop a debt model where agents have different beliefs over a long-run risk. In contrast with existing two-period competitive-equilibrium models, our infinite-horizon competitive-search model predicts more pessimistic agents are more likely to make leveraged investments on risky collateral assets. They also tend to use longer maturity debt contracts, which are more exposed to the long-run risk. Second, employing large data on real estate and mortgage transactions, combined with high ...
Working Paper
Offshoring, Mismatch, and Labor Market Outcomes
We study the role of labor market mismatch in the adjustment to a trade liberalization that results in the offshoring of high-tech production. Our model features two-sided heterogeneity in the labor market: high- and low-skilled workers are matched in a frictional labor market with high- and low-tech firms. Mismatch employment occurs when high-skilled workers choose to accept a less desirable job in the low-tech industry. The main result is that--perhaps counter-intuitively--this type of job displacement is actually beneficial for the labor market in the country doing the offshoring. Mismatch ...
Working Paper
Unemployment Insurance during a Pandemic
The CARES Act implemented in response to the COVID-19 crisis dramatically increases the generosity of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, triggering concerns about its substantial impact on unemployment. This paper combines a labor market search-matching model with the SIR-type infection dynamics to study the effects of CARES UI on both unemployment and infection. More generous UI policies create work disincentives and lead to higher unemployment, but they also reduce infection and save lives. Shutdown policies and infection risk further amplify these effects of UI policies. Quantitatively, ...
Working Paper
Wage Setting Under Targeted Search
When setting initial compensation, some firms set a fixed, non-negotiable wage while others bargain. In this paper we propose a parsimonious search and matching model with two-sided heterogeneity, where the choice of wage-setting protocol, wages, search intensity and degree of randomness in matching are endogenous. We find that posting and bargaining coexist as wage-setting protocols if there is sufficient heterogeneity in match quality, search costs or market tightness and that labor market tightness and relative costs of search play a key role in the optimal choice of the wage-setting ...