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This paper develops and estimates a life-cycle equilibrium labor search model in which heterogeneous firms determine health insurance provisions and heterogeneous workers sort themselves into jobs with different compensation packages over the life cycle. I study the optimal joint design of major policies in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the implications of targeting these policies to certain individuals. Compared with the health insurance system under the ACA, the optimal structure lowers the tax benefit of employer-sponsored health insurance and makes individual insurance more attractive to younger workers. Through changes in firms' insurance provisions, a greater number of younger workers sort into individual markets, which contributes to improving the risk pool in individual insurance and lowering the uninsured risk.

This paper presents the results from a 2.3-million-person field experiment that varies whether or not a job seeker sees the number of applicants for a job posting on a large job-posting website, LinkedIn. This intervention increases the likelihood that a person will finish an application by 3.5%. Women have a larger increase in their likelihood of finishing an application than men. Overall, adding this information to a job posting may offer a light-touch way to both increase application rates and alter the diversity of the applicant pool. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2994 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.

We analyze the effects of a government-spending expansion in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with Mortensen-Pissarides labor-market frictions, deep habits in private and public consumption, investment adjustment costs, a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function, and adjustments in employment at both intensive and extensive margins. The combination of deep habits and CES technology is crucial. The presence of deep habits magnifies the responses of macroeconomic variables to a fiscal stimulus, while an elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the range of available estimates allows the model to produce a scenario compatible with the observed jobless recovery.

We identify the main shock driving fluctuations in long-horizon productivity expectations, consistent with theories of TFP news. The identified shock induces strong comovement patterns in output, consumption, investment, employment, and stock prices even though TFP does not change significantly for more than 2 years. A labor search model in which wages are determined by a cash-flow sharing rule, rather than the present value of match surplus, matches the observed responses to the news shock. The model also matches the empirical patterns of vacancies, labor force participation, hours, and job-finding rates. The proposed wage rule is consistent with empirical responses of wages to both anticipated and unanticipated productivity changes.

We revisit the Friedman rule in a labor search model and extend Heer (2003), Cooley and Quadrini (2004), and Wang and Xie (2013) to one that allows for endogenous growth. We show that, even without a liquidity effect or a CIA constraint on firms’ wage payment, our model offers a different channel for moderate money growth to increase welfare. Intuitively, in a one-sector endogenous growth economy, the technology is of constant returns with respect to capital. When the labor market is frictional, a moderate increase in money growth induces an expansion in vacancy and employment. Labor and capital are complements in production. With an increase in employment, when the technology is neoclassical, the decreasing return in capital leads to a lower marginal product of labor. However, in an endogenous growth framework wherein the technology exhibits socially constant returns in capital, the marginal product of labor is constant. Due to a constant marginal product of labor, modest inflation raises employment, enlarges economic growth, and increases welfare. Moreover, the optimal long-run inflation rate departs from the Friedman rule, even when the Hosios rule holds. Finally, we find that our model with sustainable growth fits the data better than that without sustainable growth.

In an open-economy model with labor market search frictions and both the intensive and extensive margins, we identify two interrelated inefficiencies in the decentralized allocation. First, a trade externality arises because domestic agents do not internalize their market power on external demand, leading to excessively high import prices. Second, labor market matching frictions create suboptimal employment levels. These inefficiencies create a policy dilemma. While protectionism can address the trade externality, it comes at the cost of lower employment. Conversely, hiring subsidies can boost employment, but at the expense of higher import prices. Interestingly, and unlike the conventional view, our analysis suggests that increasing the labor tax wedge can be optimal, even in the presence of labor market frictions. This is the case in economies with large trade externality.

We develop a theoretical model with labour market frictions, incomplete financial markets, and with households which have two members. Households face unemployment risks, but their members adjust their labour supplies to insure against unemployment. We use the model to explain the cyclical properties of aggregate employment and participation. As in the U.S. data, the model predicts that the participation rate (the fraction of individuals that want jobs) is not strongly correlated with aggregate economic activity. This property is in sharp contrast to the strongly procyclical participation predicted by both neoclassical models and models with search frictions, when we assume bachelor households or households with infinitely many members (complete markets). In the two-member household model and in the data, primary earners are always in the labour force, secondary earners have a mildly countercyclical participation rate, and a mildly procyclical employment rate. Their behaviour insures the household against unemployment risks.

The business-cycle behavior of a matching model with endogenous separations is studied in this paper. We show that whether aggregate productivity shocks have a larger effect on the vacancy-unemployment ratio than in a model with exogenous separations depends on whether worker productivity stochastically increases with tenure. The difference in the response is quantitatively small, however. We also show that the cleansing effect introduced by allowing for endogenous separations can help in reconciling the model with observed fluctuations in the unemployment rate, but not with those in the vacancy rate.

We develop and estimate a medium scale macroeconomic model that allows for unemployment and staggered nominal wage contracting. In contrast to most existing quantitative models, employment adjustment is on the extensive margin and the employment of existing workers is efficient. Wage rigidity, however, affects the hiring of new workers. The former is introduced via the staggered Nash bargaining setup of Gertler and Trigari (2006). A robust finding is that the model with wage rigidity provides a better description of the data than does a flexible wage version. Overall, the model fits the data roughly as well as existing quantitative macroeconomic models, such as Smets and Wouters (2007) or Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Evans (2005). More work is necessary, however, to ensure a robust identification of the key labor market parameters.

We study the welfare costs of business cycles in a search and matching model with financial frictions. The model replicates the volatility on labor and financial markets. Business cycle costs are sizable. Indeed, the interactions between labor market and financial frictions magnify the impact of shocks via (i) a credit multiplier effect and (ii) an endogenous wage rigidity inherent to financial frictions. In addition, in a nonlinear framework, large welfare costs of fluctuations are explained by the high average unemployment and the low job finding rates with respect to their deterministic steady-state values.