The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Alexandre Mas (University of California, Berkeley) for this session.
Alexandre Mas is a Professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves as co-Director of the Labor Studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His work focuses on labor markets, human resources, and the empirical analysis of workplace behavior, drawing on advanced data and statistical methods. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) as well as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Event Topic:
The Labor Market as an Equilibrium Newsvendor Problem
I study hiring under uncertainty when firms can either hold permanent labor as a buffer or hire from a spot market after demand is realized. I build a model where the spot market is endogenously determined such that when one firm relies more on spot labor, it thickens the market that other firms use as well. Individual firms do not internalize that contribution, so the competitive equilibrium involves too much buffering. I evaluate the model in the market for registered nurses using the universe of daily time sheet records from skilled nursing facilities. The data support the model’s general equilibrium predictions. Markets with thicker agency markets have less rationing conditional on total nursing hours, and compressed upper tails of permanent staffing with higher overall hours in the lower part of the distribution. Estimating a facility-level newsvendor model with heterogeneous spot market frictions and rationing costs I find that the nursing labor market was more efficient post-COVID, there are substantial welfare gains from bringing frictions down to those of the most efficient markets, and that the marginal external benefit for a firm that participates in the spot market instead of hiring an employee as buffer averages 12 percent of wages. This labor market underprovides flexibility because the value of availability is not fully priced.
Event Details:
Date: 07 July 2026
Time: 14:00–15:15
Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.
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