Equilibrium Unemployment: The Role of Discrimination

U.S. labor markets are increasingly diverse and persistently unequal between genders, races and ethnicities, skill levels, and age groups. We use a structural model to decompose the observed differences in labor market outcomes across demographic groups in terms of underlying wedges in fundamentals. Of particular interest is the potential role of discrimination, either taste-based or statistical. Our model is a version of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model extended to include a life cycle, learning by doing, a nonparticipation state, and informational frictions. The model exhibits group-specific wedges in initial human capital, returns to experience, matching efficiencies, and job separation rates. We use the model to reverse engineer group-specific wedges that we then feed back into the model to assess the fraction of various disparities they account for. Applying this methodology to 1998–2018 U.S. data, we show that differences in initial human capital, returns to experience, and job separation rates account for most of the demographic disparities; wedges in matching efficiencies play a secondary role. Our results suggest a minor aggregate impact of taste-based discrimination in hiring and an important role for statistical discrimination affecting particularly female groups and Black males. Our approach is macro, structural, unified, and comprehensive.

The Ways the Cookie Crumbles: Education and the Margins of Cyclical Adjustment in the Labor Market

I document that less educated workers experience higher and more cyclically sensitive job separation rates. Meanwhile, workers with a bachelor's degree or more exhibit pro-cyclical wages while workers without a high school degree exhibit no statistically discernible cyclical pattern. Differences in the sensitivity are most stark when measurement of labor costs accounts for the value of the persistent effects of current macroeconomic conditions on future remitted wages. These findings suggest optimally differential implementation of self-enforcing implicit wage contracts in which educated workers and their employers leverage relative employment stability to smooth the effects of cyclical fluctuations over longer horizons. This margin of adjustment is less available to the less well educated, who have shorter expected employment durations. Furthermore, failure to account for the heterogeneities documented here leads to substantial underestimation of the welfare costs of business cycles.

Stuck At Home? The Drag of Homeownership on Earnings After Job Separation

This note takes a novel approach to study the question of whether housing ownership has negative effects on workers' mobility. While most of the literature has focused on studying differential migration rates between owners and renters, commonly known as "house-lock", we analyze this question from the perspective of differences in earnings.

Worker Mobility and Domestic Production Networks

We show that domestic production networks shape worker flows between firms. Data on the universe of firm-to-firm transactions for the Dominican Republic, matched with employer-employee records, reveals that about 20 percent of workers who change firms move to a buyer or supplier of their original firm. This is a considerably larger share than would be implied by a random allocation of movers to firms. We find considerable gains associated with this form of hiring: higher worker wages, lower job separation rates, faster firm productivity growth, and faster coworker wage growth. Hiring workers from a supplier is followed by a rising share of purchases from that supplier. These findings indicate that human capital is easily transferable along the supply chain and that human capital accumulated while working at a firm is complementary with the intermediate products/services produced by that firm.

Family job search and wealth: The added worker effect revisited

We propose and estimate a model of family job search and wealth accumulation with data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This dataset reveals a very asymmetric labor market for household members who share that their job finding is stimulated by their partners' job separation. We uncover a job search‐theoretic basis for this added worker effect, which occurs mainly during economic downturns, but also by increased nonemployment transfers. Thus, our analysis shows that the policy goal of increasing nonemployment transfers to support a worker's job search is partially offset by the spouse's cross effect of decreased nonemployment and wages. The added worker effect is robust to having more children and more education in the household and does not just result as a composition of heterogeneous individuals. We also show that the interdependency between household members is understated if wealth and savings are not considered. Finally, we show that gender equality in the labor market not only improves women's labor market performance, but it also increases men's accepted wages and nonemployment rates.

Short-time work: A bridge to employment security or a springboard to unemployment?

This article investigates the employment effect of short-time work in the Netherlands during the Great Recession (2009–2011). Short-time work was introduced during the period as a special arrangement with the aim of reducing unemployment hikes by offering firms the possibility of adjusting the working time of specialised workers rather than adjust the size of their workforce. The authors focus on the effect of short-time work at the individual level of the worker and study whether short-time programme participants in surviving firms had a lower job turnover rate and transition rate to unemployment compared to workers who did not participate in the programme. Furthermore, the authors study whether the flexibility policies of the firm had a substantial influence on the effectiveness of short-time work in protecting workers from unemployment. Specifically, they investigate whether the effect of short-time work is related to the intensiveness of its use by the firm and the extensiveness of the use of external flexibility arrangements – i.e. temporary contracts and temporary agency workers – by the firm. For this purpose, the authors apply a discrete-time survival model using a unique dataset with monthly register data from Statistics Netherlands. Participants in the short-time work programme are compared with non-participant workers from firms that used short-time work and workers from firms that did not make use of the programme. The findings indicate that, in surviving firms, short-time work had a positive effect: the risk of unemployment and job separation is, in most cases, lower for short-time work participants than non-participants. Short-time work is most effective in protecting workers from unemployment in firms that extended the use of the programme to many workers and for a relatively small number of hours, and that made either moderate use of temporary agency workers or extensive use of fixed-term contracts.

Anatomy of Non-Employment Risk

This paper investigates how job separation and job-finding probabilities shape the non-employment risk across ages and working group characteristics. Improving on current methods, I estimate duration models for employment and non-employment separately. I then use the results to derive the individual age profiles of conditional transitions in and out of non-employment as well as the unconditional non-employment risk profile over the whole working life. This approach allows me to apply the decomposition of changes in individual non-employment risk. To date, this type of decomposition has only been used to study aggregate non-employment dynamics. I find that differences in job separation rates across ages underlie the observed age differences in non-employment risk. When differences between working groups are under consideration, the job finding probability is just as important as the job separation probability.

Fiscal stimulus and unemployment dynamics

Focusing on both hiring and firing margins, this paper revisits effects of fiscal stimulus on unemployment. We develop a DSGE model with search frictions where job separation is endogenously determined. The predictions of the model are in contrast with earlier studies that assume exogenous separation. Our model can capture the empirical pattern of responses of the job finding, separation, and unemployment rates to a government spending shock, obtained from a structural VAR model with the US data. However, our model fails to capture the response of vacancies and the volatility of unemployment. We discuss the roles of cyclical movements of matching efficiency and labor force participation to fix this model’s shortcoming.