We develop a model where labor market structure affects the division of surplus between firms and workers. Using Austrian data we show that in more concentrated labor markets, workers are more likely to return to past employers. In our model, the possibility of these re-encounters endows firms...

The Bartik instrument is formed by interacting local industry shares and national industry growth rates. We show that the typical use of a Bartik instrument assumes a pooled exposure research design, where the shares measure differential exposure to common shocks, and identification is based on...

We develop a quantitative framework for exploring how individuals trade off the utility benefit of social activity against the internal and external health risks that come with social interactions during a pandemic. We calibrate the model to external targets and then compare its predictions with...

We investigate learning at the workplace. To do so, we use German administrative data that contain information on the entire workforce of a sample of establishments. We document that having more highly paid coworkers is strongly associated with future wage growth, particularly if those workers...

This paper models a frictional labor market where employers endogenously discriminate against the long term unemployed. The estimated model replicates recent experimental evidence which documents that interview invitations for observationally equivalent workers fall sharply as unemployment...

We propose a theory of intermediation as rent extraction, and explore its implications for the extent of intermediation, welfare and policy. A frictional asset market is populated by agents who are heterogeneous with respect to their bargaining skills, as some can commit to take-it-or-leave-it...

What market structure emerges when market participants can choose the rate at which they contact others? We show that traders who choose a higher contact rate emerge as intermediaries, earning profits by taking asset positions that are misaligned with their preferences. Some of them, middlemen,...

This paper estimates workers' preferences for firms by studying the structure of employer-to-employer transitions in U.S. administrative data. The paper uses a tool from numerical linear algebra to measure the central tendency of worker flows, which is closely related to the ranking of firms...

Prior literature has established that displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs. This literature assumes that these are involuntary separations owing to economic distress. This paper examines this assumption by matching...

The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term “human capital,” seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The...