Expansions are usually associated with plentiful vacancies and a low number of unemployed workers. During recessions the unemployment pool swells while employers seek to fill fewer job openings.

This paper evaluates the dynamic response of worker flows, job flows, and vacancies to aggregate shocks in a structural vector autoregression. We identify demand, monetary, and technology shocks by imposing sign restrictions on the responses of output, inflation, the interest rate, and the...

This paper estimates an identified VAR on US data to gauge the dynamic response of the job finding rate, the worker separation rate, and vacancies to monetary policy shocks. I develop a general equilibrium model that can account for the large and persistent responses of vacancies, the job...

This paper extends Shimer's (2005) Mismatch model to allow for endogenous mobility. Rather than work directly in the original model, I use a related framework, the stock-flow matching model (Taylor, 1995; Coles and Muthoo, 1998). One of the contributions of this paper is therefore to compare the...

In the context of a standard equilibrium matching framework, this paper considers how a duration dependent unemployment insurance (UI) system affects the dynamics of unemployment and wages in an economy subject to stochastic job-destruction shocks. It establishes that re-entitlement effects...

In aggregate U.S. data, exogenous shocks to labor productivity induce highly persistent and hump-shaped responses to both the vacancy-unemployment ratio and employment. We show that the standard version of the Mortensen-Pissarides matching model fails to replicate this dynamic pattern due to the...

This paper investigates the relationship of the ``unemployment gap'' between the United States and Europe to the opening of international capital markets. The unemployment gap widened dramatically in the mid-1980's, a time period characterized also by significant increases in international...

Shimer (2005) showed that a standard search and matching model of the labor market fails to generate fluctuations of unemployment and vacancies of the magnitude observed in US data in response to shocks to average labor productivity of plausible magnitude. He also suggested that wage...