Job Creation and Destruction

The content of this book is original, controversial, and important. The standards of scholarship are of the first order. It will be a scholars classic and an important source of information for the serious student of policy. Indeed, judging by the literature this work has already spawned, it has achieved that status already.

Dale Mortensen, Ida. C. Cook Professor, Department of Economics, Northwestern University

This book, together with the data behind it, must be among the most useful things that have happened in economics in recent years. It is not only of direct interest to a wide variety of fields, including macroeconomics, labor economics and industrial organization, but also endorses and helps create a new field, where all these subdisciplines intersect. I doubt there is today any other piece of empirical work generating as much excitement as this one.

Ricardo J. Caballero, Professor of Econoimcs, MIT

Job Creation and Destruction is the bible of the new view of the labor market. Every commentator on job turnover and labor-market dynamics should read this book carefully.

Robert E. Hall, Professor of Economics, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Few books ever published in economics document evidence that has as broad an impact on our profession as this one. Davis, Haltiwanger and Schuh show that the heterogeneity among firms in both the levels, and the changes over time, in the variables we typically want to analyze is enormous. The implication is that the convenient representative agent paradigm for analyzing either the economy, or an industry within it, misses almost all of the action in the data. They then analyze these differences with an eye to their policy implications and to determining the nature of the models that might fit them. This is a book whose results have already had a huge impact on a wide variety of economists, policy makers and statistical agencies, and whose importance will grow further as we all slowly digest its implications.

Ariel Pakes, Professor of Economics, Yale University

In this book, Steve Davis, John Haltiwanger and Scott Schuh beautifully bring together their influential empirical work on job creation and job destruction and show what can be learned from it in the light of recent theoretical thinking, much of it stimulated by their own work. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the dynamics of employment, industry and the business cycle.

Christopher Pissarides, Professor of Economics, London School of Economics

This landmark study should be read by every economist interested in unemployment, jobs, and the evolution of the economy.

Peter Diamond, Professor of Economics, MIT

There are few subjects in economics as important as job creation and destruction. The Davis, Haltiwanger and Schuh volume provides important new evidence at the plant and individual level that helps answer old puzzles and poses new ones. The importance of job reallocation and its relation to aggregate fluctuations must be addressed by any explanation of the business cycle. The results of this line of research are being very widely cited and used already. The authors have substantially enriched the debate and given a multitude of insights.

Martin Neil Baily, University of Maryland, McKinsey Global Institute and NBER

Davis, Haltiwanger, and Schuh's book is a wonderfully clear and detailed description of the creation and destruction of jobs. It will be the standard in a rapidly expanding literature in the U.S. and abroad on this subject.

Bruce Meyer, Professor of Economics, Northwestern University