Essays on Macroeconomics and Labor Markets

Job mobility – the rate at which employed workers change their jobs without experiencing unemployment in between – plays a significant role in shaping individual level economic outcomes as well aggregate labor market dynamics. At the micro level, workers climb up the job ladder and receive wage increases by changing employers. Experimentation by way of switching jobs leads young workers into their right career paths. At the aggregate level, job mobility might improve the allocative efficiency of the labor market by facilitating the match of productive workers and firms. This dissertation sheds light on two issues pertaining to job mobility in the U.S. Chapter 1 studies the observed decline in employer-to-employer transitions in the U.S. during the last two decades, and proposes an explanation for this downward trend. Chapter 2 proposes a framework for analyzing the excess unemployment risk following a job- to-job transition and lays the groundwork for a broader future research agenda./nChapter 1 starts from the observation that employer-to-employer (E-E) transi- tions have declined in the United States during the last 20 years from a monthly rate of 2.7 percent in 1996 to 1.7 percent in 2016. In this chapter, I study the factors behind this observed decline. I document that most of the decrease in E-E transitions is accounted for by declines in matches with less than 12 months of job tenure. I attribute this decline to an increase in information about the quality of job opportunities. I then develop a search model with heterogenous matches and on-the-job search with learning about match quality. I show that the information channel can be identified from the change in the wage growth of job switchers. I estimate my model and find that workers in recent years have substantially more in- formation about matches before they are formed, turning jobs into inspection goods rather than experience goods. I find that this increase in information explains 50 to 60 percent of the decline in job mobility over the last two decades./nChapter 2 starts from the empirical finding that the risk of job loss is concen- trated in the early months of the job; after the initially high levels of unemployment risk, jobs become stable. This chapter argues that this initial excess exposure to un- employment risk renders job-to-job transitions risky. It formalizes this mechanism in a search and matching model in which job offers are “lotteries”, placing probabilities on job qualities, which are revealed early on in the new job. Workers know the prob- ability weights, and lotteries are heterogeneous in those weights. A set of job quality realizations lead workers to prefer quitting into unemployment. In this model, job mobility is affected by the value of unemployment, which represents the downside risk of accepting a job lottery. This consideration constitutes a mobility friction for employed workers. It explores all these properties and predictions in a calibrated version of the model. The chapter also highlights a new role of unemployment in- surance (UI): In the model, UI insures the downside risk of job-to-job transitions, and thereby subsidizes job mobility of workers already employed, and tilts the job composition to ex-ante riskier jobs. Chapter 2 closes by discussing potential implica- tions of this new view of unemployment insurance. The study therefore sheds light on how labor market policies affect the behavior of employed job seekers through a novel “experimentation subsidy” channel.

Advisor: Gorodnichenko, Yuriy