In the wake of a severe recession and a sluggish recovery, labor market slack cannot be gauged solely in terms of the conventional measure of the unemployment rate (that is, the number of individuals who are not working at all and actively searching for a job). Rather, assessments of the employment gap should reflect the incidence of underemployment (that is, people working part-time who want a...

Gender Differences in Job Separation Rates and Employment Stability: New Evidence from Employer-Employee Data I analyze the job separation process to learn about gender differences in job separation rates and employment stability. An essential finding is that employer-employee data are required to identify gender differences in job separation probabilities because of labor market segregation. F...

The number of jobs added or lost in the U.S. economy every month is one of the most eagerly awaited statistics among policymakers and market participants. For example, we may recall the recent episode of a “jobless recovery,” in which even though the recession was officially over in the fourth quarter of 2001, the apparent weakness of the labor market continued into 2002 and 2003. During that p...

We consider a competitive equilibrium growth model where technological progress is embodied into new jobs which are assigned to workers of different skills. In every period workers decide whether to actively participate in the labor market and if so how many hours to work on the job. Balanced growth requires that the job technology is complementary with the worker’s total labor input in the job...

This paper studies whether the Mortensen and Pissarides (MP) search and matching model can explain the observed labor market fluctuations in Japan. Although the MP model correctly predicts the observed regularities in the cyclical fluctuations of unemployment and job vacancies, it cannot generate the observed unemployment and vacancy fluctuations in response to productivity shock of reasonable ...

Sequential stochastic assignment problems now comprise a signi"cant literature that includes such important economical applications as the classical asset-selling problem and labor-market analysis (job search). In this type of problems there is a stream of bidders to whom several identical units at the disposal of the decisionmaker have to be sold. In this paper we incorporate holding costs to ...

This paper presents one of the first formal dynamic models of job search by older individuals. It also presents an empirical analysis of job search behavior among this population using the Health and Retirement Study. Several factors currently compound to make the topic of this research an important one in the agenda of the Economics of Aging: ongoing demographic, epidemiological, socio-economi...

Flexibility vs. Rigidity: Does Spain have the worst of both Worlds? In this paper we study the structure of labor market flows in Spain and compare them with France and the US. We characterize a number of empirical regularities and stylized facts. One striking result is that the job finding rate is slightly higher than in France, while the jon loss rate is much higher, putting Spain half-way be...

For most workers, access to suitable employment is severely restricted by the fact that they look for jobs in the regional labor market rather than the global one. In this paper we analyze how macrolevel opportunities (regional market characteristics) and microlevel restrictions (the extent to which job searchers are restricted to the regional market) can help to explain the phenomenon of overe...

The adverse labor market effects of the Great Recession have intensified interest in policy efforts to spur job creation. The two most direct job creation policies are subsidies that go to workers and hiring credits that go to employers. Evidence indicates that worker subsidies are generally more effective at creating jobs. However, the unique circumstances of recovery from the Great Recession,...