We build a hybrid model of the aggregate labor market that features both standard labor supply forces and frictions in order to study the cyclical properties of gross worker flows across the three labor market states: employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation. Our parsimonious model is able to capture the key features of the cyclical movements in gross worker flows. Despite the fact that the wage per efficiency unit is constant over time, intertemporal substitution plays an important role in shaping fluctuations in the participation rate.

We investigate the importance of job-to-job (JJ) transitions for cyclical wage dynamics. By exploiting cross-state variation, we find that wage growth is tightly linked to variation in the JJ transition probability, and conditional on this, the job finding probability of the unemployed has no explanatory power. We investigate the robustness of our results to several caveats and find the result to hold. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for competing theories of wage dynamics.