The labor market in the Great Recession and its aftermath is characterized by great difficulty in escaping unemployment. I present two empirical analyses of a particular explanation for that difficulty, that the housing market crisis has prevented the unemployed from selling their homes and moving to take new jobs. First, I examine post-job-loss mobility rates by home ownership status using data from the Displaced Workers Survey. Second, I examine mobility rates for unemployed homeowners and renters from the month-to-month CPS match. Neither analysis provides any support for the idea that the housing market crisis has reduced mobility of the unemployed.

I develop a model of daily labor supply where preferences are dependent on a reference daily income level, and I apply this model to data on the labor supply of New York City taxi drivers. I find that there may be a reference level of income on a given day that affects labor supply. However, there is substantial day-to-day variation in a given driver's reference level, and most shifts end before reaching the reference income level. This pattern is inconsistent with an important role for reference-dependent preferences.

The dramatic decline in the demand for union representation among nonunion workers over the last decade is investigated using data on worker preferences for union representation from four surveys conducted in 1977, 1980, 1982, and 1984. Relatively little of the decline can be accounted for by shifts in labor force structure. However, virtually all of the decline is correlated with an increase in the satisfaction of nonunion workers with their jobs and a decline in nonunion workers ' beliefs that unions are able to improve wages and working conditions.

this paper contains the development of the model to be tested, while Section II provides an interpretation of the model and spells out the testing framework. Section III contains a description of the sample, while Section IV contains the empirical results and an example of their use in analyzing a particular bargaining situation. Section V provides a summary of the results, a discussion of some of their limitations, and suggestions for further research

An important stylized fact about labor markets is that workers with longer seniority with their current employer have higher earnings than other workers with the same total labor market experience. This study shows that the measured positive cross-sectional return to seniority is largely a statistical artifact due to the correlation of seniority with an omitted variable representing the quality of the worker, job, or worker-employer match. The implication is that earnings do not, in fact, rise very much with seniority.

We summarize findings from an audit study investigating how unemployment duration, age, and holding a low-level “interim” job affect the likelihood that experienced college-educated females applying for administrative support jobs receive a callback from potential employers. The results show no relationship between callback rates and unemployment duration. In contrast, workers age 50 and older and workers with an “interim” job are significantly less likely to receive callbacks. We also summarize disparate findings in the growing literature of resume-based audit studies of career histories, and discuss avenues in which the literature could achieve results that are more comparable and externally valid.