EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market

Victoria Gregory, Guido Menzio and David Wiczer

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Using a large panel dataset of US workers, we calibrate a search-theoretic model of the labor market, where workers are heterogeneous with respect to the parameters governing their employment transitions. We first approximate heterogeneity with a discrete number of latent types, and then calibrate type-specific parameters by matching type-specific moments. Heterogeneity is well approximated by 3 types: as, �s and ?s. Workers of type a find employment quickly because they have large gains from trade, and stick to their jobs because their productivity is similar across jobs. Workers of type ? find employment slowly because they have small gains from trade, and are unlikely to stick to their job because they keep searching for jobs in the right tail of the productivity distribution. During the Great Recession, the magnitude and persistence of aggregate unemployment is caused by ?s, who are vulnerable to shocks and, once displaced, they cycle through multiple unemployment spells before finding stable employment.

Keywords: Search frictions; Unemployment; Business Cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 O40 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2022-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2022/CES-WP-22-10.pdf First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market (2021) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:22-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson (dawn.m.anderson@census.gov).

 
Page updated 2025-01-05
Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:22-10