We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

Empirically, the income share is procyclical for the low-income groups and acyclical for the top 5%. We find that business cycle models should consider overlapping generations and elastic labor supply in order to replicate this finding.

We investigate the sources of the great changes in GDP volatility observed from 1966 to 2000. We develop a general equilibrium model and calibrate it to US data in order to characterize the contribution of micro level productivity shocks, inter-sectoral linkages and households' behavior to...

In this paper, we conduct an empirical study of how uncertainty alters fertility behavior. The precautionary motive for saving predicts that an increase in income uncertainty increases saving by reducing both consumption and fertility. We examine this prediction using a new measure of economic...

This paper examines the small world hypothesis. The first part of the paper presents empirical evidence on the evolution of a particular world: the world of journal publishing economists during the period 1970-2000. We find that in the 1970's the world of economics was a collection of islands,...

In this paper we analyse the short- and long-run relationship between employment growth, inflation and output growth in Phillips' tradition. For this purpose we apply FMOLS, DOLS, PMGE, MGE, DFE, and VECM methods to a nonstationary heterogeneous dynamic panel including annual data for 119...

In addition to the humanitarian suffering and huge immediate economic costs, the war in Ukraine will have long-term consequences, among which are losses in human capital that will impact aggregate productivity for many years. Exploiting a new stock measure of human capital combining the quality...

We study how occupations shape individual and aggregate retirement behavior. First, we document large differences in individual retirement ages across occupations in U.S. data. We then show that retirement behavior among European workers is strongly correlated with U.S. occupational retirement...

We study whether employment history provides information about a worker's "work attitude," i.e., the tendency to act cooperatively and reliably in the workplace. We conjecture that, holding all else equal, frequent job changes can indicate poor work attitude and that this information is...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...