At the onset of the COVID pandemic, the U.S. economy suddenly and swiftly lost 20 million jobs. Over the next two years, the economy has been on the recovery path. We assess the labor market two years into the COVID crisis. We show that early employment dynamics were almost entirely driven by...

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...

Exploiting results from the literature on non-parametric identification, we make three methodological contributions to the empirical literature estimating the matching function, commonly used to map unemployment and vacancies into hires. First, we show how to non-parametrically identify the...

We compare patterns of unemployment and joblessness between Canada and the U.S. during the Great Recession. Similar to previous findings for the U.S. in Kroft et al. [2016], we document a rise in long-term unemployment in Canada. This increase is not accounted for by changes in the observable...

We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. We reweight the NLSY79 to look like the NLSY97 along a number of dimensions that are related to labor market success,...