Worker-Firm Screening and the Business Cycle

Jake Bradley ()
Additional contact information
Jake Bradley: University of Nottingham

No 15017, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: There has been a substantial body of work modeling the co-movement of employment, vacancies, and output over the business cycle. This paper builds on this literature, and informed by empirical investigation, models worker and firm search and hiring behavior in a manner consistent with recent micro-evidence. Consistent with empirical findings, for a given vacancy, a firm receives many applicants, and chooses their preferred candidate amongst the set. Similarly, workers in both unemployment and employment, can evaluate many open vacancies simultaneously and choose to which they make an application. Business cycles are propagated through turbulence in the economy. Structural parameters of the model are estimated on U.S. data, targeting aggregate time series. The model can generate large volatility in unemployment, vacancies, and worker flows across jobs and employment state. Further, it provides a theoretical mechanism for the shift in the Beveridge curve after the 2008 recession - a phenomenon often referred to as the jobless recovery. That is, persistently low employment after the recession, despite output per worker and vacancies having returned to pre-crisis levels.

Keywords: Beveridge curve; screening; jobless recovery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J63 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15017.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iza:izadps:dp15017

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().