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Working Paper
The Geography of Job Creation and Job Destruction
Spatial differences in labor market performance are large and highly persistent. Using data from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we document striking similarities across these countries in the spatial differences in unemployment, vacancies, and job filling, finding, and separation rates. The novel facts on the geography of vacancies and job filling are instrumental in guiding and disciplining the development of a theory of local labor market performance. We find that a spatial version of a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model with endogenous separations and on-the-job search ...
Working Paper
The Dual Beveridge Curve
The recent behavior of the Beveridge Curve significantly differs from past recessions and is hard to explain with traditional gradual changes in fundamentals. We propose a novel dual vacancy model where we acknowledge that not all vacancies are made equal—when firms post a vacancy they can hire from unemployment or they can poach a worker from another firm. Our dual vacancy model segments the labor market into separate search processes for unemployed and employed workers and provides a better fit to the data than traditional models assuming a homogeneous market. By analyzing labor market ...
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 have changed dramatically.
Working Paper
The Unintended Consequences of Employer Credit Check Bans for Labor Markets
Over the last 15 years, 11 states have restricted employers’ access to the credit reports of job applicants. We estimate that county-level job vacancies have fallen by 5.5 percent in occupations affected by these laws relative to exempt occupations in the same counties and national-level vacancies for the same occupations. Cross-sectional heterogeneity suggests that employers use credit reports as signals of a worker’s ability to perform the job: vacancies fall more in counties with a large share of subprime residents, while they fall less for occupations with other commonly available ...
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
Minimum Wage Increases and Vacancies
We estimate the impact of minimum wage increases on the quantity of labor demanded as measured by firms’ vacancy postings. We use proprietary, county-level vacancy data from the Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online to analyze the effects of minimum wage increases on the quantity of labor demanded. Our identification relies on the disproportionate effects of minimum wage hikes on different occupations, as the wage distribution around the binding minimum wage differs by occupation. We find that minimum wage increases during the 2005–18 period led to substantial declines in vacancy ...
Working Paper
COVID-19: A View from the Labor Market
This paper examines the response of the U.S. labor market to a large and persistent job separation rate shock, motivated by the ongoing economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use nonlinear methods to analytically and numerically characterize the responses of vacancy creation and unemployment. Vacancies decline in response to the shock when firms expect persistent job destruction and the number of unemployed searching for work is low. Quantitatively, under our baseline forecast the unemployment rate peaks at 19.7%, 2 months after the shock, and takes 1 year to return to 5%. Relative to ...
Working Paper
The Business Cycle Mechanics of Search and Matching Models
This paper estimates a real business cycle model with unemployment driven by shocks to labor productivity and the job separation rate. We make two contributions. First, we develop a new identification scheme based on the matching elasticity that allows the model to perfectly match a range of labor market moments, including the volatilities of unemployment and vacancies. Second, we use our model to revisit the importance of shocks to the job separation rate and highlight how their correlation with labor productivity affects their transmission mechanism.
Working Paper
Minimum Wage Increases and Vacancies
We estimate the impact of minimum-wage increases on the quantity of labor demanded as measured by firms’ vacancy postings. We use propriety, county-level vacancy data from the Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online database. Our identification relies on the disproportionate effects of minimum-wage hikes on different occupations, as the wage distribution around the binding minimum wage differs by occupation. We find that minimum-wage increases during the 2005-2018 period have led to substantial declines in vacancy postings in at-risk occupations, occupations with a larger share of ...
Working Paper
Labor Market Tightness during WWI and the Postwar Recession of 1920-1921
The U.S. economy entered the 1920s with a robust job market and high inflation but fell into a recession following the Federal Reserve's discount rate hikes to tame inflation. Using a newly constructed data set, we study labor market dynamics during this period. We find that labor markets were tight when the Federal Reserve began tightening monetary policy, but they became loose following the tightening as the recession deepened. The demand-supply imbalance in the labor market was driven by a sharp decline in the number of job openings. We also show that the recession had an uneven effect on ...