The technological origins of the decline in labor market dynamism

Abstract

In the last decades, there has been a marked decline in the job flows to and from unemployment and between employment. We ask whether and how technological change can account for his secular decline in labor market dynamism. We propose a theory that focuses on the determinants of technology broadly defined: 1. the complementarity between worker skill and firm productivity; and 2. the volatility in productivity shocks; and 3. search frictions. We derive job flows in a sorting model with search frictions and endogenous search effort both on and off the job, as well as shocks that lead to mismatch. We quantify our model using the US data and find an increase in the complementarity between labor and technology, a decline in the frequency and volatility of productivity shocks, and a decline in the match efficiency as well as an increase in the search costs. The changing nature of these features of the technology contributes to the secular decline in labor market dynamism.