I present four facts about occupational mobility: (1) most movements occur within firms, (2) downward moves are frequent, (3) wage growth reflects the direction and distance of mobility, and (4) relative occupational wages before mobility predict the direction of mobility, except for...

Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we show that the COVID-19 pandemic led to a loss of aggregate real labor earnings of more than $250 billion between March and July 2020. By exploiting the panel structure of the CPS, we show that the decline in aggregate earnings was entirely...

We investigate employer recruiting behavior, using detailed firm-level data from a national survey of employers hiring recent college graduates. We show employers adjust recruiting effort, hiring standards, and compensation with the business cycle, beliefs about tightness, and their own hiring...

This paper studies the cyclical behaviour of earnings risk and career changes. We document that the procyclical skewness of the earnings growth distribution arises mostly from the earnings changes of employer and occupation switchers. To uncover their relative importance in driving cyclical...

Using detailed micro data, we document that households often use "stimulus" checks to pay down debt, especially those with low net wealth-to-income ratios. To rationalize these patterns, we introduce a borrowing price schedule into an otherwise standard incomplete markets model. Because interest...

The Canadian labour market experienced a period of unprecedented turmoil following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze the main changes using standard labour force statistics and new data on job postings. Envisaging a phase of temporary severing of employment relationships followed by...

The empirical literature on employer learning assumes that employers learn about unobserved ability differences across workers as they spend time in the labor market. This article describes testable implications that arise from this basic hypothesis and how they have been used to quantify the...

Both policy makers and researchers have devoted considerable attention in recent years to the large current account and capital account imbalances among OECD countries. In particular, the size of the United States current account deficit has attracted intense attention and spawned numerous...

While it is well known that education strongly predicts health, less is known as to why. One reason might be that education improves health-care decision making. In this paper we attempt to disentangle improved decision making from other effects of education, and to quantify how large an impact...

Two ubiquitous empirical regularities in pay distributions are that the variance of wages increases with experience, and innovations in wage residuals have a large, unpredictable component. The leading explanations for these patterns are that over time, either firms learn about worker...