I’d like to go, but it’s a long way from Quebec City to Vancouver for a weekend conference. The programme looks interesting.

Here are some papers that I wish I could see in person:

Learning from unemployment, by Franciso Gonzalez and Shouyong Shi:

In this paper we analyze unemployed workers’ learning during search about the aggregate matching efficiency in the market. Each worker chooses whether to participate in the market and which submarket to search in. A submarket is described by a wage and a job finding probability, with a higher wage being accompanied by a lower job finding probability. After each period of search, an unemployed worker updates his belief about the matching efficiency. We show that, as the number of past search failures increases, a worker’s potential wage falls and the likelihood for the worker to exit the market rises. We also find that an increase in the unemployment benefit can simultaneously account for (i) a lower flow from unemployment to employment; (ii) a lower flow from unemployment to out of the labor force; (iii) a higher unemployment duration; and (iv) a lower probability for the workers who are out of the labor force to re-enter the labor force. These results are useful for explaining the differences in unemployment and labor force participation between the US and continental European
countries.

A Quantitative Theory of the Gender Gap in Wages, by Luisa Fuster, Andres Erosa and Diego Restuccia:

Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we document that gender differences in wages almost double during the first 20 years of labor market experience and that there are substantial gender differences in employment and hours of work during the life cycle. A large portion of gender differences in labor market attachment can be traced to the impact of children on the labor supply of women. We develop a quantitative life-cycle model of fertility, labor supply, and human capital accumulation decisions. We use this model to assess the role of fertility on gender differences in labor supply and wages over the life cycle. In our model, fertility lowers the lifetime intensity of market activity, reducing the incentives for human capital accumulation and wage growth over the life cycle of females relative to males. We calibrate the model to panel data of men and to fertility and child related labor market histories of women. We find that fertility accounts for most of the gender differences in labor supply and wages during the life cycle documented in the NLSY data.

Schumpeterian Restructuring, by Huw Lloyd-Ellis and Patrick François:

We develop a Shumpeterian theory of business cycles that relates job creation, job destruction and wages over the cycle to the processes of firm restructuring, innovation and implementation that drive long—run growth. Due to incentive problems, production workers are employed via relational contracts and experience involuntary unemployment. Job destruction and firm turnover are counter—cyclical, but labour productivity growth and job creation are procyclical. Endogenous fluctuations in job creation on the intensive margin are the dominant source of changes in employment growth. Our framework also highlights the countercyclical forces on wages due to restructuring, and illustrates the relationship between the cyclicality of wages and long—run productivity growth.

Vehicle Currency, by Mick Devereux and Shouyong Shi:

An important feature of the international financial system is that it overwhelmingly uses a major currency, such as the US dollar, as a vehicle in the exchange between other currencies. In this paper we construct an  equilibrium model to study this feature. The model economy has a nite number of countries, and each country’s goods are sold only for the country’s own currency. Households obtain foreign currencies at trading posts. Each post involves one pair of currencies, and there is a fixed cost of operating the post. We study two types of equilibria. One is the symmetric trading equilibrium, in which there is an active post for every pair of currencies and so there is no vehicle currency. The other is the vehicle currency equilibrium, in which all countries exchange for a particular currency first and then use that currency to exchange for other currencies. We analyze how the use of a vehicle currency changes each country’s consumption and welfare, relative to the symmetric equilibrium. We study the constraints on the inflation rate of the vehicle currency that must be satisfied in order for a currency to be a robust vehicle currency.