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John Kennes has put together quite an impressive resource on the ‘economics of search and matching’ (on which he’s giving a full course this Fall, in Aarhus: if you are a master/PhD student active/interested in the area, you really don’t want to miss that). I have to admit I see myself several of those internet-accessible search and/or matching (and beyond) materials (e.g., many YouTube lectures) for the first time. Great job, John: hope you’ll keep developing that site!
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In a previous post I mentioned taking part in this year’s Macro Perspectives Workshop at the NBER Summer Institute. Ex post, the workshop was indeed host to a number of interesting paper presentations and often lively discussions. In arbitrary order and obviously subject to my idiosyncrasies, I thought some of the finest contributions were: Farhi and Werning’s “Insurance and Taxation over the Life Cycle“, Kaas and Kircher’s “Efficient Firm Dynamics in a Frictional Labour Market“, and Cosar, Guner and Tybout’s “Firm Dynamics, Job Turnover, and Wage Distributions in an Open Economy“.
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I’ve now read (airtravel is a great means for reducing your pile of must-read research papers) Jean-Marc Robin’s paper “On the Dynamics of Unemployment and Wage Distributions”, of which I’ve seen a very stimulating presentation at the EALE/SOLE conference from mid June, in London. I think this is indeed an interesting (if still subject to further empirical validation) alternative, building up from micro- to macro- modelling, to– this is not entirely correct, but I will try to fit a catch-all term– ‘direct wage stickiness’ models advanced over the recent years (and largely embraced since). While wage rigidity remains essentially the main culprit in explaining wage inequality dynamics patterns (varying cyclicality at different cuts in the wage distribution), the underlying mechanism is different than hitherto considered, a combination of worker heterogeneity and aggregate shocks to match productivity delivering both unemployment volatility and different renegotiation process of extreme, as opposed to intermediate, wage levels. Moreover, as Jean-Marc emphasizes in the conclusion of the paper, his benchmark suggests some straightforward, pretty exciting avenues for further research.
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I’ll let you figure out the link with the search & matching (or the Economics!): here’s John Adams with sufficient reasons to read Gustave Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’ for a second(third,…nth?) time. And if you didn’t know (or: know all too well) that Flaubert is for grande prose what Mahler is for grande musique– think details, precision, Herculian labour– read Adams’s (channelling Vargas Llosa) “Perpetual Orgy” sequel, too.
