U.S. CPS gross flows data indicate that in recessions firms actually increase their hiring rates from the pools of the unemployed and out of the labor force. Why so? The paper provides an explanation by studying the optimal recruiting behavior of the representative firm. This behavior is a...

The Arab population in Israel constitutes an ethnic minority, at around 20% of the population. The economy of this minority is characterized by inferior outcomes relative to the Jewish majority by all indicators, including employment, wages, occupational status, social welfare, education, and...

Does the search and matching model fit aggregate U.S. labor market data? While the model has become an important tool of macroeconomic analysis, recent literature pointed to some significant failures in accounting for the data. This paper aims to answer two questions: (i) Does the model fit the...

Using time-diary data from 25 countries, we demonstrate that there is a negative relationship between real GDP per capita and the female-male difference in total work time per day - the sum of work for pay and work at home. In rich northern countries on four continents, including the United...

The picture of U.S. labor market dynamics is opaque. Empirical studies of U.S. gross worker flows have yielded contradictory findings, and it is not easy to get a sense of the key moments of the data. Debates have emerged regarding the implications of these flows for the understanding of the...

The paper explores the consequences of macroeconomic policy for labor market outcomes in the presence of frictions. It shows how policy may be useful in overriding frictions, as well as how it might generate adverse outcomes. The analysis looks at the main tools of macroeconomic policy and...

H. Gregg Lewis did fundamental research outlining the economic effects of trade unions and considering how to measure them carefully. He also laid out the theory of the supply and demand for labor in careful detail that has underlain economists' thinking about these outcomes. Aside from...

This paper studies the effects of mass immigration from the former USSR to Israel in the 1990s on the employment of the native-born. The exogeneity and the size of this inflow make it a "natural experiment" of macroeconomic proportions. An open-economy macroeconomic model is used to analyze this...