Labor Supply in a Frictional Labor Market∗

We develop a model featuring search frictions and a nondegenerate labor supply deci-sion along the extensive margin, and argue that it does a reasonable job of matching labor market flows between employment, unemployment and out of the labor force. Persistent idiosyncratic productivity shocks play a key role in allowing the model to match the persistence of the employment and out of the labor force states found in individual labor market histories. We then use this model to address two questions: how do taxes affect aggregate employment and how do changes in frictions affect aggregate employment. We find that the presence of empirically plausible frictions has virtually no impact on the response of aggregate employment to taxes. The labor supply response present in our model greatly attenuates the employment response to frictions relative to the simplest matching model