This paper studies the role of professional networks in facilitating migration location decisions within the US. Using administrative Census data, I find new empirical evidence of the effects of coworker networks on the location choice of migrants, consistent with information provision about opportunities in other local labor markets. Workers are significantly more likely to move to the destinations of their coworkers than the destinations of non-coworkers from the same industry and location. The results are robust to accounting for alternative explanations such as moves within the same firm or establishment closures. Additionally, coworkers who have worked together longer have a greater likelihood of migrating to the same locations. Moves to the same destination firms account for only a small portion of the network effect, suggesting that direct job referrals play only a small role in facilitating such migration. The estimated network effects are stronger among workers who move further distances, are older, and have higher earnings.

This paper examines the relationship between labor specialization and labor market search frictions. Using online job vacancy data, I construct occupation-level measures of specialization based on the rarity of skills associated with job postings. I also combine vacancy counts with hiring flows and unemployment from the Current Population Survey to estimate matching efficiency at multiple occupational aggregation levels. I find evidence that more specialized occupations are associated with lower matching efficiency, implying greater frictional unemployment. In standard macroeconomic labor search models, matching efficiency is typically treated as exogenous; my results suggest it may be systematically related to the economy’s occupational composition. This tradeoff between the productivity benefits of specialization and the slower reallocation of labor suggests profound macroeconomic implications: it can affect aggregate unemployment, the position of the Beveridge curve, and the speed of labor market adjustment after shocks.

Using data on worker residential location from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD), I study how the distance between U.S. workers' residential and employment locations has changed since the 2020 global pandemic. I find that mean and median work-home distances have increased since 2020 Q2. The increase in distance is largely driven by workers who have been hired since 2020 Q2, as opposed to workers hired before then, suggesting that the geographic labor market in which employers are searching has expanded as a result of the pandemic. However, from 2020 Q2 to 2022, the mean distance declines for those new hires, suggesting that an initial increase in distance has tempered over time, consistent with corporate return-to-office policies. Additionally, the increase in distance is driven primarily by jobs in the information technology industry, and to a lesser extent by jobs in the professional services, finance, and administration industries.