Employer Market Power with Endogenous Labor Market Boundaries
with Claudia Macaluso and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Draft, May 2026 · Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (2026)
Employer market power is typically measured under fixed labor market boundaries. Using over 63 million online job applications to U.S. hourly jobs, we show that workers broaden their geographic search when their home market is concentrated or cyclically weak: about one in three searches falls outside a typical commuting zone, and the share of workers searching farther from home rises in downturns. A search-and-matching model with granular firms and multi-market search rationalizes these facts and yields distinct predictions for reallocation, wages, and pass-through that we confirm in the data.
Inflation and Exchange Rate Shocks in the Presence of Parallel Markets
with Toni Oki
Draft, May 2026 · NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics
We study exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in dual-rate economies, where an official rate coexists with a parallel rate at a meaningful premium. Using daily parallel-market quotes and monthly data for Nigeria from 2014 to 2023, a parallel-rate depreciation driven by foreign-exchange rationing raises cumulative inflation by about 0.5% over the following year, while a policy-driven devaluation of the official rate does not — operating instead through reduced money creation as the naira value of dollar revenues rises. The asymmetry holds across the food sub-index and other categories and is sharper when the parallel premium is wide; central banks that track only the official rate understate the sensitivity of inflation to exchange rate movements.
Technology and Search in Rental Housing Markets
with Arnav Deshpande
This paper studies how technological improvements that raise meeting rates can raise rents, particularly in supply-constrained markets. The magnitude depends on how tight the housing market is: rent increases are larger in tight markets and attenuate as housing supply expands.