Aggregate Implications of Labor-Market Composition

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three essays on the movements of workers into and out of employment and unemployment---in other words, the composition of the labor market. The first provides an overview. It describes the US economy's ability to create new hires from unemployment and vacancies and some implications for labor--macro models. The second considers fishery management plans in a two-sector, random search environment, where one sector harvests fish. The optimal composition of jobs is described. The third investigates how labor-market composition affects the cyclical behavior of wages informed by random search models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, the Current Population Survey, and the Current Employment Statistics program.