Accounting for observed uctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using optimality conditions of a representative household often requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors (e.g., Mankiw, Rotemberg, and Summers, 1985). This discrepancy between the...

We introduce worker differences in labor supply, reecting differences in skills and assets, into a model of separations, matching, and unemployment over the business cycle. Separating from employment when unemployment duration is long is particularly costly for workers with high labor supply....

We model worker heterogeneity in the rents from being employed in a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model of matching and unemployment. We show that heterogeneity, reflecting differences in match quality and worker assets, reduces the extent of fluctuations in separations and unemployment. We find...