During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) increased US unemployment benefits by $600 a week. Theory predicts that FPUC will decrease job applications, and could decrease vacancy creation. We estimate the effect of FPUC on job applications and vacancy...

Job differentiation gives employers market power, allowing them to pay workers less than their marginal productivity. We estimate a differentiated jobs model using application data from Careerbuilder.com. We find direct evidence of substantial job differentiation. Without the use of instruments...

How do employers attract the right workers? How important are posted wages vs. other job characteristics? Using data from the leading job board CareerBuilder.com, we show that most vacancies do not post wages, and, for those that do, job titles explain more than 90% of the wage variance. Job...

Could we significantly reduce U.S. unemployment by helping job seekers move closer to jobs? Using data from the leading employment board CareerBuilder.com, we show that, indeed, workers dislike applying to distant jobs: job seekers are 35% less likely to apply to a job 10 miles away from their...

Unemployment insurance (UI) can affect unemployment duration and re-employment wages, through various dimensions of unemployed workers' job search behavior. We shed light on the effects of UI on job search behavior using new longitudinal data: we link administrative registers to data from a...

How much power do employers have to suppress wages below marginal productivity? It depends on the firm-level labor supply elasticity. Leveraging data on job applications from the large job board CareerBuilder.com, we estimate the wage impact on workers' choice among differentiated jobs in the...