We construct new estimates of potential output and the output gap using a multivariate approach that allows for an explicit role for measurement errors in the decomposition of real output. Because we include data on hours, output, employment, and the labor force, we are able to decompose our...

A feature of GMM estimation--the use of a consistent estimate of the optimal weighting matrix rather than the joint estimation of the model parameters and the weighting matrix--can lead to the sensitivity of GMM estimation to the choice of parameter normalization. In many applications, including...

A model's ability to explain procyclical movements in real wages has become an important benchmark by which macroeconomists judge business cycle theories. Because Keynesian models with sticky nominal wages predict countercyclical real wages, they have been criticized and dismissed in favor of...

In Silicon Valley's computer cluster, skilled employees are reported to move rapidly between competing firms. If true, this job-hopping facilitates the reallocation of resources towards firms with superior innovations, but it also creates human capital externalities that reduce incentives to...

In order to measure the flexibility of the labor market, evaluate the job-worker matching process, and model business-cycle dynamics, economists have studied the flows of workers across the labor market states of employment, unemployment, and not in the labor force. One important flow that has...

The recent U.S. expansion has provided employment experience to individuals at tail of the skill distribution. Will these opportunities bestow persistent benefits in the form of greater future employability? Using synthetic cohorts constructed from the CPS, this paper estimates the degree of...

Despite the importance of employer-to-employer (EE) flows to our understanding of labor market and business cycle dynamics, the literature has lacked a comprehensive and representative measure of the size and character of these flows. To construct the first reliable measures of EE flows for the...

This paper models a firm's choice of employment adjustment costs as one component of its choice of production process. In making a one-time choice of production process, firms tradeoff increased flexibility--the reduced cost of changing levels of production--against the diminished efficiency of...

This paper applies some lessons from recent estimation of investment models with firm-level data to the aggregate data with an eye to rehabilitating convex costs of adjusting the capital stock. In recent firm-level work, the response of investment to output and other "fundamental" variables is...

We use simulations of the Federal Reserve's FRB/US model to examine the efficacy of a number of proposals for reducing the consequences of the zero bound on nominal interest rates. Among the proposals are: a more aggressive monetary policy; promises to make up any shortfall in monetary ease...