Search Results
A Hard or Soft Landing? The Answer May Lie in the Beveridge Curve
The traditional Beveridge curve suggests that a sharp rise in unemployment is needed to meaningfully lower the job vacancy rate. But the curve shaped by the pandemic labor market may signal a different result.
Working Paper
Job Applications and Labor Market Flows
Job applications have risen over time yet job-finding rates remain unchanged. Meanwhile, separations have declined. We argue that increased applications raise the probability of a good match rather than the probability of job-finding. Using a search model with multiple applications and costly information, we show that when applications increase, firms invest in identifying good matches, reducing separations. Concurrently, increased congestion and selectivity over which offer to accept temper increases in job-finding rates. Our framework contains testable implications for changes in offers, ...
Working Paper
What Do Survey Data Tell Us about US Businesses?
This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice. We compare survey responses of business owners with available data from administrative tax records, brokered private business sales, and publicly traded company filings and document problems due to nonrepresentative samples and measurement errors across several surveys, subsamples, and years. We find that the discrepancies are economically relevant for the statistics of interest. We investigate reasons for ...
Working Paper
How Should Unemployment Insurance Vary over the Business Cycle?
We study optimal unemployment insurance (UI) over the business cycle using a heterogeneous agent job search model with aggregate risk and incomplete markets. We validate the model-implied micro and macro labor market elasticities to changes in UI generosity against existing estimates, and provide an explanation for divergent empirical findings. We show that generating the observed demographic differences between UI recipients and non-recipients is critical in determining the magnitudes of these elasticities. We find that the optimal policy features countercyclical replacement rates with ...
Overemployed Workers? Trends on Multiple Jobholders
After tumbling during the pandemic, the share of employed people holding more than one job has recovered to its pre-pandemic level.
Working Paper
Labor Market Policies During an Epidemic
We study the positive and normative implications of labor market policies that counteract the economic fallout from containment measures during an epidemic. We incorporate a standard epidemiological model into an equilibrium search model of the labor market to compare unemployment insurance (UI) expansions and payroll subsidies. In isolation, payroll subsidies that preserve match capital and enable a swift economic recovery are preferred over a cost-equivalent UI expansion. When considered jointly, however, a cost-equivalent optimal mix allocates 20 percent of the budget to payroll subsidies ...
How Has the COVID-19 Recession Affected U.S. Labor across Occupations and Industries?
COVID-19 hit the U.S. labor market hard, but relative changes in employment and hours worked vary across occupations and industries.
Working Paper
Spousal Labor Supply Response to Job Displacement and Implications for Optimal Transfers
I document a small spousal earnings response to the job displacement of the family head. The response is even smaller in recessions, when earnings losses are larger and additional insurance is most valuable. I investigate whether the small response is an outcome of the crowding-out effects of government transfers. To accomplish this, I use an incomplete markets model with family labor supply and aggregate fluctuations where predicted spousal labor supply elasticities with respect to transfers are in line with microeconomic estimates both in aggregate and across subpopulations. Counterfactual ...
Working Paper
Dissecting the Great Retirement Boom
Between 2020 and 2023, the fraction of retirees in the working-age population in the U.S. increased above its pre-pandemic trend. Several explanations have been proposed to rationalize this gap, including increases in net worth, the deterioration of the labor market with higher job separations, the expansion of fiscal transfer programs, and higher mortality risk. We develop an incomplete markets, overlapping generations model with a frictional labor market to quantitatively study the interaction of these factors and decompose their contributions to the rise in retirements. We find that new ...
Compensation Patterns of Overemployed Workers
An analysis showed U.S. workers with multiple jobs had on average slightly higher annual earnings but lower hourly pay than workers with a single job.