We document a new set of facts regarding the impact of referrals on labor market outcomes. Our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between different types of referrals-those from family and friends and those from business contacts-and different occupations. Then we develop an...

This paper tries to prove that the outcomes stemming from interactions on assignment markets bring about coordination in case of a stochastic matching subject to various forms of expectations. We consider an exchange network with stochastic matching between the pairs of players and analyze the...

Women report setting lower reservation wages than men in survey data. We show that women set reservation wages that are 14 to 18 percent lower than men's in laboratory search experiments that control for factors not fully observed in surveys such as offer distributions and outside options. This...

Firms and workers predominately match via job postings, networks of personal contacts or the public employment agency, all of which help to ameliorate labor market frictions. In this paper we investigate the extent to which these search channels have differential effects on labor market...

In markets where sellers' marginal costs of production have a common component, they have informational advantage over buyers regarding those costs. This information asymmetry between sellers and buyers is especially relevant in markets where buyers have to uncover prices through costly search....

The green transition towards a carbon neutral economy constitutes a technological transformation, in which firms need to invest in new, clean technologies. In order to be operated, these new technologies often require a set of technology-specific skills that differ from those that were relevant...

Firms and workers predominately match via job postings, networks of personal contacts or the public employment agency, all of which help to ameliorate labor market frictions. In this paper we investigate the extent to which these search channels have differential effects on labor market...

The job finding rate declines with the duration of unemployment. While this is a well established fact, the reasons are still disputed. We use monthly search diaries from Swiss public employment offices to shed new light on this issue. Search diaries record all applications sent by job seekers,...

We propose a tractable method for estimation of a simultaneous search model for differentiated products that allows for observed and unobserved heterogeneity in both preferences and search costs. We show that for type I extreme value distributed search costs, expressions for search and purchase...

I propose a model in which agents decide on job search intensity for each possible wage, unlike the usual setup of constant search intensity over wage draws. The proposed framework entails efficiency gains in that agents do not waste effort to searching for low paying unacceptable jobs or less...

We study a variation of the classical Pandora's problem in which a decision-maker (DM) sequentially explores alternatives from a given set and learns their values while trying to acquire the best alternative. The variations in the model we study are (i) alternatives randomly become unavailable...

We study the problem of optimal search (with costly information acquisition) for the best alternative among a pool of candidates that belong to different societal groups. Due to baked-in biases in the prior data, group-unaware comparisons of candidates may lead to unfair treatment of certain...

We propose a general protocol for calibration and validation of complex simulation models by an approach based on discovery and comparison of causal structures. The key idea is that configurations of parameters of a given theoretical model are selected by minimizing a distance index between two...

This paper studies the employment and reallocation effects of minimum wages in Germany in a search-and-matching model with endogenous job search effort and vacancy posting, multiple employment levels, a progressive tax-transfer system, and worker and firm heterogeneity. I find that minimum wages...

We develop a theory of labor markets in a monetary economy with four realistic features: search frictions, worker productivity shocks, wage rigidity, and two-sided lack of commitment. Due to the non-Coasean nature of labor contracts, inefficient job separations occur in the form of endogenous...

A new explicit form is provided for the solution of optimal stopping problems involving a multidimensional geometric Brownian motion. A free-boundary value approach is adopted and the value function is obtained via fundamental solution methods. There are many applications for the valuation of...

Recent research documents mounting evidence for sizable and persistent biases in individual labor market expectations. This paper incorporates subjective expectations into a general equilibrium labor market model and studies the implications of biased expectations for wage bargaining, vacancy...

We report on a laboratory experiment testing the predictions of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) search-and-matching model, which is a workhorse, decentralized model of unemployment and the labor market. We focus on the job vacancy posting problem that firms face in the DMP model. We...

We model fairness within the context of search. To do this, consider sequential search where the searcher is uncertain about the underlying pool of candidates. Fairness is introduced by requiring that candidates cannot be discriminated against by non-merit characteristics or by the order in...

Cross-border migration can act as an important adjustment mechanism to country-specific shocks. Yet, depending on who moves, it can have unintended consequences for business cycle stability. This paper argues that the skill composition of migration plays a critical role. When migration flows...

This paper studies the role of institution in a Darwinian evolutionary process of cultural selection. The primary function of an institution is to determine how citizens in a society are matched pairwisely to interact. We examine three different types of institutions: utilitarian, egalitarian,...

This paper extends the classical search framework and allows the decision-maker to choose information endogenously and flexibly. We consider a problem in which the manager chooses the best among two ex ante identical candidates. The manager learns the qualities of candidates sequentially and can...

When mobility between locations is frictional, a person's economic well-being is partially determined by her place of birth. Using a life cycle model of mobility, we find that search frictions are the main impairment to the mobility of young people in Spain, and these frictions are particularly...