This paper uses personnel records for workers employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) between 1921 and 1944 to examine the extent to which observed career dynamics are consistent with the predictions of various models of internal labor markets. In addition, the findings provide new insight into how internal labor markets responded to Great Depression. Similar to some previous empirical s...

Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study and Current Population Surveys, we find that labor market conditions play a large role in explaining the positive relationship between educational attainment and marriage. Our results suggest that if low-educated parents faced the same (stronger) labor market conditions as their more-educated counterparts, then differences in marria...

Increasing integration of economic activities enforces large scale reallocations of labor between firms. This reallocation pressure requires necessarily an increase in the separation rate of jobs. While new jobs are created, reallocation can not achieved instantaneously if labor markets are characterized by frictions. I introduce hiring costs in a Melitz type model of international trade with n...

Mr. Crockett: May I make an analogy and see whether it conveys any insights? In the finance field, we think of technology and liberalization as having driven the enormous changes in financial markets. Technology enables the better pricing of risk; liberalization allows risk to be more efficiently managed and traded. Could one say that something similar is taking place in labor markets? Technolo...

Eighteenth-century American farms were family owned, family operated, and selfsufficient. At the same time, the fertility of the population inhabiting those farms was extremely high. These two characteristics of the rural population were mutually reinforcing. Selfsufficiency meant an absence of well-developed markets that, in turn, required reliance upon family-based mechanisms of reciprocity t...

This paper develops a dynamic model of mismatch. Workers and jobs are randomly assigned to labor markets. Each labor market clears at each instant but some have more workers than jobs, hence unemployment, and some have more jobs than workers, hence vacancies. As workers and jobs move between labor markets, some unemployed workers find vacant jobs and some employed workers lose or leave their jo...

The paper studies the employment effects of a deposit-refund scheme on labor in a simple search-theoretic model of the labor market. It is shown that if a firm pays a deposit when it fires a worker, to be refunded when it employs the same or another worker, the vacancy rate increases and the unemployment rate declines. The scheme introduces rigidities in the labor market, however, which may be ...

We build an analytically and computationally tractable stochastic equilibrium model of unemployment in heterogeneous labor markets. Facing search frictions within markets and reallocation frictions between markets, workers endogenously separate from employment and endogenously reallocate between markets, in response to changing aggregate and local conditions. Empirically, using the 1986-2008 SI...

Which people end up in which jobs is not merely a matter of the individual and human capital characteristics of workers and the requirements and rewards of jobs, but is also a function of the process by which persons and jobs are matched with one another (Granovetter 1981; Sørensen and Kalleberg 1981). A poorly understood component of the matching process is how workers and employers find infor...

The article aims to explain what kind of intercultural communication competence is needed in border crossing labor markets. The experiences of international higher education students and information and communications technology (ICT) experts are analyzed in different Finnish working and educational environments. We seek answers to the following questions: How are language and communicative abi...