The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation - the secular reallocation of employment across sectors - over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using...

We examine whether greater Medicaid generosity encourages mobility towards riskier but better jobs in higher paid occupations and industries. We use Current Population Survey Data and exploit variation in Medicaid thresholds across states and over time through the 1990s and 2000s. We find that...

The recession the United States economy entered in December of 2007 is considered to be the most severe downturn the country has experienced since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate reached as high as 10.1 percent in October 2009 - the highest we have seen since the 1982 recession. In...

This review maps out the labour market situation of PhDs employed in the private sector. To begin with, the theoretical motives for employing PhDs and the supporting empirical evidence are examined. The potential benefits of companies from employing PhDs can be divided into productivity and...

We discuss how the relative importance of factors that contribute to movements of the U.S. Beveridge curve has changed from 1960 to 2023. We review these factors in the context of a simple flow analogy used to capture the main insights of search and matching theories of the labor market. Changes...

U3, the official unemployment rate, is an inadequate gauge of labor-market slack and the extent to which it misinforms varies substantially over the business cycle. The U6 unemployment rate is usually about 4 percentage points above U3. However, during the Great Recession it exceeded U3 by 7...

The official U.S. unemployment rate is an inadequate measure of actual labor market conditions. This poses a major challenge for researchers and confuses both the public and policy makers. A new definition of unemployment is proposed. It considers those part-time workers who would like to work...

There is a rich tradition of research on how social capital operates in the labor market. Much of this research adopts a supply-side perspective, and examines how network factors influence job seekers' success in the labor market. Recent research by Mouw (2003, 2006), however, has called into...