Hello, I'm
Fabien Postel-Vinay
Research Professor, Department of Economics, SMU
Research Affiliate, Dallas Fed
Research Fellow, IFS
My research aims at gaining a better understanding of labor markets, and more generally of markets affected by trading frictions — using applied theory and applied econometrics, often combined through structural econometric modelling.
Featured
In joint work with my long-time co-author Giuseppe Moscarini, we argue that he AC ratio — job-to-job switching relative to unemployment-to-employment hiring — predicts wage and price inflation.
What does the AC ratio have to do with inflation? A high ratio means employed workers are quitting a lot relative to how easy it is for the unemployed to find jobs: a sign of labor market mismatch, which adds slack to labor supply and keeps wages in check. A low ratio means the opposite — workers are well-matched and reluctant to leave, so vacancies are hard to fill and employers raise pay to retain them. That pay pressure feeds through to prices.
In short, mismatch predicts inflation, and AC is a measure of mismatch.
Selected recent publications
-
2025
"A Structural Analysis of Health and Labor Market Trajectories,"Review of Economic Studies, 92(3), 1920–54
-
2024
"Measuring Employer-to-Employer Reallocation,"American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 16(3), 1–51
-
2024
"On-the-job Search and Business Cycles,"Revue Economique, 75(1), 73–112
-
2023
"Multidimensional Sorting under Random Search,"Journal of Political Economy, 131(12), 3497–539