A Nobel Prize "for unemployment theory"

Marginal Revolution's Alex Tabarrok explains how economists Peter A. Diamond, Dale T. Mortensen, and Christopher A. Pissarides' work in unemployment theory earned them the Nobel Prize today:

A key breakthrough was to realize that the problem was not how to explain unemployment per se but rather how to explain hiring, firing, quits, vacancies and job search and to think of unemployment as the result of all of this underlying microeconomic behavior.  Notice that the underlying behavior involves not just workers looking for jobs but also employers looking for workers so explaining unemployment would require a theory of job search, worker search and matching and each aspect of the theory would have to be consistent with every other aspect; i.e. how much workers search depends on how much employers are searching (e.g. advertising) and vice-versa and also on the quality of matching and all of these considerations need to be addressed together.  It was Mortensen and Pissarides in particular, building on work by Diamond, who built just such a consistent model.

Read the whole post here.