Although the U.S. poverty rate was the same in 2000 as it was in 1970, the geographic distribution of the poor has become more concentrated. A higher concentration of poor in poor neighborhoods is a concern because it may mean the poor are exposed to fewer opportunities that affect their...

New models of employment show that there are some cases in which a minimum wage can have positive effects on employment and social welfare. The effects depend ultimately on the prevailing market wage and the frictions in the market. Evidence to date does not support the view that raising the...

This paper constructs a multiple-shock version of the Mortensen-Pissarides labor market search model to investigate the basic model’s well-known tendency to under predict the volatility of key labor market variables. Data on U.S. job finding and job separation probabilities are used to help...

This paper studies amplification of productivity shocks in labor markets through on-the-job-search. There is incomplete information about the quality of the employee-firm match which provides persistence in employment relationships and the rationale for on-the-job search. Amplification arises...

Can two countries, or two different states, with similar technologies, resources, and policies exhibit differences in labor market performance? In contrast to a commonly held view, the answer is yes under some conditions that we review in this Commentary. If these conditions are satisfied, the...

We construct a multiple shock, discrete time version of the Mortensen-Pissarides labor market search model to investigate the basic model’s well-known tendency to underpredict the volatility of key labor market variables. In addition to the standard labor productivity shock, we introduce...

This paper proposes an empirical method for estimating a long-run trend for the unemployment rate that is grounded in the modern theory of unemployment. I write down an unobserved-components model and identify the cyclical and trend components of the underlying unemployment flows, which in turn...

We show that the inability of a standardly-calibrated stochastic labor search-and-matching model to account for the observed volatility of unemployment and vacancies extends beyond U.S. data to a set of OECD countries. We also argue that using cross-country data is helpful in evaluating the...

This paper evaluates the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that leverage unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches—the more reduced form approach of Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) and the more...