Essays on Unemployment and Job Search

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2016. Major: Economics. Advisors: José-Víctor Ríos-Rull, Christopher Phelan. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 82 pages.This thesis consists of two chapters. In Chapter 1 I show evidence of job search behavior for the unemployed in the U.S. By using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) between 2003 and 2014, I document that the unemployed in the U.S. appear to allocate their time to job search regardless of the state of the economy. They increase search intensity only slightly if at all during recessions. While their search intensity depends on a number of factors that change over the business cycle, I primarily argue that a countercyclical value of a job is the most promising explanation to reconcile the evidence with the theory. I show this by providing estimates of the cyclicality of the value of a job in the U.S. To infer the cyclicality of the value of a job, I build on Chodorow-Reich and Karabarbounis (2015), who construct estimates for the opportunity cost of employment. I develop a strategy to gauge an upper bound for the size of job search costs based on the size of the value of non-working time. I discipline these estimates by using an expression for the value of a job that emerges from a search model. In Chapter 2, I address the role of risk aversion in shaping the job search behavior over the business cycle. I first show that a sufficiently high degree of risk aversion could make the unemployed look for work in a countercyclical fashion, as the data suggests: more intensely in recessions and less intensely in booms. Empirically, I show that such a behavior is inconsistent with the degree of risk aversion used pervasively in the business cycle literature. With the aim of assessing to what extent risk aversion could still play a role, I introduce consumption commitments into an otherwise job search model. As shown by Chetty and Szeidl (2007), commitments in consumption could amplify the degree of risk aversion, the reason being an uneven adjustment in consumption along different spending categories in response to wealth shocks. Empirically, I find partial support to the insights stemming from the theoretical framework. The results show that the amplification is sensitive to the classification of small and large shocks. I discuss theoretical avenues to improve our understanding on the role of commitments in shaping the job search behavior