Éva Nagypál

Assistant Professor of Economics
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, Economics, Stanford University, 2001
nagypal@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Éva Nagypál specializes in the field of labor and macroeconomics. Her research focuses on labor-market dynamics both at the micro- and macro-level, the determination of unemployment and of firms’ hiring behavior, and the impact of macroeconomic policies on labor-market outcomes. She has extensively studied how learning affects the formation and dissolution of employment relationships and its interaction with employment protection policies. Her current interest is in understanding job-to-job transitions, the moves of workers between employers without an intervening unemployment spell, their role in the reallocation of labor towards its more productive uses, and their interaction with labor-market regulation.

Current Projects

Economics of Adoption. Americans adopt more children domestically and internationally than any other nationality in the world, with 2.5 percent—or 2 million—of all American children being adopted. IPR Faculty Fellow Éva Nagypál and her colleagues will conduct the first econometric analysis of the "adoption market," with funding from the National Science Foundation. They will create a new data set from the National Survey of Family Growth and the Survey of Income and Program Participation to trace historical U.S. adoption trends in the United States. Their aim is to show how different elements such as adoption law reform, marriage-market dynamics, and labor market policy changes affect decision making about constituting families in the United States. Eventually, they hope to show how different policy interventions influence decisions about adoption and fertility. Nagypál is working with Chiaki Moriguchi, assistant professor of economics at Northwestern; Luojia Hu, a senior economist at the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank; and Raquel Bernal, assistant professor of economics at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia.

On the Extent, Efficiency, and Cyclical Behavior of Job-to-Job Transitions. This study develops a new theoretical model of job-to-job transitions that is able to match observed salient features of these transitions, both in terms of their magnitude and of their variation across groups of workers and across stages of the business cycle. It then studies the efficiency properties of the proposed model and policy implications of theories of frictional labor markets that incorporate this empirically grounded model of job-to-job transitions.

Equilibrium search models portray unemployment as a social cost that is necessary to achieve optimal labor reallocation. In fact, they predict that under certain conditions the unemployment observed in decentralized markets is equal to its socially optimal level. The introduction of job-to-job transitions, in which the reallocation of labor towards its more productive uses takes place without workers having to bear the burden of unemployment, challenges these conclusions. The study thus provides new insights not only about worker turnover but also about the optimality of the observed level of unemployment.

The Effect of Quits on Vacancy Creation: Theory and Evidence. A firm’s recruitment effort can signify either the firm’s desire to expand or its need to replace workers who have quit positions that are profitable for the firm to continue to operate. The costs of these two recruitment activities are different if workers who quit leave behind firm-specific physical and organizational capital they utilized. With Jason Faberman of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Nagypál is developing a model that distinguishes these two motivations for recruitment activity. The model naturally creates a distinction between worker and job flows and allows the authors to tie the total cost of recruiting to the level of search on the job. They employ the Simulated Method of Moments to estimate the model, using establishment-level panel microdata on quits, separations, vacancies, and hires in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

Selected Publications

Nagypál, E. 2007. Learning-by-doing versus learning about match quality: Can we tell them apart? Review of Economic Studies, 74 (2), pp. 537-566.

Nagypál, E. (with Dale Mortensen) 2007. More on unemployment and vacancy Fluctuations Review of Economic Dynamics, 10 (3), pp. 327-347.

Nagypál, E. 2006. Comment on "Volatility and dispersion in business growth rates: Publicly-traded versus privately-held firms." NBER Macroeconomics Annual 21(1):167-179 .

Nagypál, E. 2006. Amplification of productivity shocks: Why don't vacancies like to hire the unemployed? In Structural Models of Wage and Employment Dynamics, ed. H. Bunzel, B. Christensen, G. Neumann, and J.-M. Robin. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Nagypál, E., and Z. Eckstein. 2004. The evolution of U.S. earnings inequality: 1961-2002. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review 28(2): 10-28.

Nagypál, E. 2004. Comment on "Business cycle and the life cycle." NBER Macroeconomics Annual 19(1): 462-77.