It is well known that the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model exhibits a strong trade-off between cyclical unemployment fluctuations and the size of rents to employment. Introducing endogenous job search effort reduces the strength of the trade-off while bringing the model closer to the data....

Reasonably calibrated versions of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search and matching model of unemployment underpredict, by a wide margin, the volatility of vacancies, unemployment, and the vacancies-unemployment ratio - variables at the heart of this model. These shortcomings motivate two...

The finite state Markov-Chain approximation method developed by Tauchen (1986) and Tauchen and Hussey (1991) is widely used in economics, finance and econometrics in solving for functional equations where state variables follow an autoregressive process. For highly persistent processes, the...

Motivated by large educational differences in geographic mobility, this paper considers a simple dynamic extension of Roy's (1951) model and analyzes it using new evidence on net versus excess mobility and the individual-level relationship between mobility and wages. According to the model, the...

In the US unemployment insurance (UI) system, only a fraction of those eligible for benefits actually collect them. We estimate this fraction using CPS data and detailed state-level eligibility criteria. We find that the fraction of eligible unemployed collecting benefits has been persistently...

In the U.S., the cross-state differences in unemployment rates are large - for instance, large compared to variations in the national unemployment rate over time. At the same time, there is considerable labor mobility within the U.S.; in fact, enough that, if migration arbitrages differences in...

Recent work of Galindev and Lkhagvasuren (2009) shows that for highly persistent autoregressive processes Rouwenhorst's (1995) method outperforms other existing methods in the scalar case along key lower-order moments. Although lower order moments are sufficient to evaluate the existing few...

This paper proposes a moment-matching method for approximating vector autoregressions by finite-state Markov chains. The Markov chain is constructed by targeting the conditional moments of the underlying continuous process. The proposed method is more robust to the number of discrete values and...

Considerable labor mobility exists across U.S. states, enough that, if migration arbitrages local unemployment, one might expect very low unemployment differences across states. However, cross-state data reveal large unemployment differences. An equilibrium multi-location model with stochastic...

We use novel high-frequency panel data on individuals' job applications from an online job posting engine to study (1) whether at the beginning of search job seekers with different levels of education (skill) apply to different jobs, and (2) how search behavior changes as search continues....