Standard economic theory suggests that individuals know best how to make themselves happy. Thus, policies designed to encourage "better" behaviors will only reduce people's happiness. Recently, however, economists have explored the role of impatience, especially difficulties with delaying...

In this paper we develop and quantitatively assess a tractable equilibrium search model of the labour market to analyse the long-term wage costs of a job loss. In our framework, these costs occur due to losses in workers' human capital and firm specific compensation, interruptions to workers'...

We partner with a Public Employment Service to examine whether jobseekers can be encouraged to reskill for shortage occupations. In a large-scale field experiment involving 100,000 recently unemployed individuals, we provide information on shortage occupations and related training opportunities....

Our study investigates the occupational job search strategies of more than 60,000 unemployed workers in Denmark. We find substantial heterogeneity in how job seekers allocate their search activities across dierent occupations, and this heterogeneity persists throughout the duration of their...

Standard macroeconomic models underpredict the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. A common solution is to assume wages are rigid. We explore whether this explanation is consistent with the data. We show that the wage of newly hired workers, unlike the aggregate wage, is volatile and...

Standard macroeconomic models underpredict the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. A common solution is to assume wages are rigid. We explore whether this explanation is consistent with the data. We show that the wage of newly hired workers, unlike the aggregate wage, is volatile and...

Empirical studies find that the age-variance profile of wages is U-shaped. The objective of this paper is to explore the driving forces of the U-shape in a model with search frictions. I introduce endogenous search effort and a fixed retirement age into Cahuc, Postel-Vinay, and Robin s (2006)...

Shimer (2005) and Hall (2005) have documented the failure of standard labor market search models to match business cycle fluctuations in employment and unemployment. They argue that it is likely that wages are not adjusted as regularly as suggested by the model, which would explain why...

We present a structural framework for the evaluation of public policies intended to increase job search intensity. Most of the literature defines search intensity as a scalar that influences the arrival rate of job offers; here we treat it as the number of job applications that workers send out....

In a non-stationary job search model we allow unemployed workers to have a permanent option to leave the labor force. Transitions into nonparticipation occur when reservation wages drop below the utility of being nonparticipant. Taking account of these transitions allows the identification of...