Based largely on industry-level aggregate statistics, the prevailing view, and one that has strongly influenced macroeconomic thought, is that real wages during the cycle containing the Great Depression are either acyclical or countercyclical. Does this finding hold-up when more micro data are...

This paper investigates the relative cyclical behavior of the pay of piece workers and hourly paid workers. It uses a unique data set of blue-collar workers in British engineering between 1926 and 1966. The statistics are obtained from the payrolls of firms belonging to the Engineering Employers...

We estimate the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the child care market. We find that the industry is substantially more exposed to the business cycle than other low-wage industries and responds more strongly to negative shocks than positive ones. Indeed, child care employment requires more...

Based on data from a cross section of U.S. metro areas, we show that public employment correlates negatively with business cycle volatility, hinting at a stabilizing effect of public employment, while public wages correlate weakly and positively with business cycle volatility, hinting at a...

Immigrants have figured prominently in U.S. economic growth for decades, but the recent recession hit them hard. Immigrantsﾒ labor market outcomes began deteriorating even before the recession was officially underway, largely as a result of the housing bust. An analysis of employment and...

This paper analyzes the role of the extensive vis-à-vis the intensive margin of labor adjustment in Germany and in the United States. The contribution is twofold. First, we provide an update of older U.S. studies and confirm the view that the extensive margin (i.e., the adjustment in the number...

In this paper we use information on the cyclical variation of labor market participation to learn about the aggregate labor supply elasticity. For this purpose, we extend the standard labor market matching model to allow for endogenous participation. A model that is calibrated to replicate the...

This study investigates the extent and speed of dynamic adjustment of labour supply to changes in labour demand, government policies and autonomous trends. We estimate error-correction models (ECMs) for male and female participation rates in the Netherlands between 1969 and 2004. The results...

This study identifies a new mechanism to account for the persistent gender differences in earnings after childbirth. Aside from women's voluntary wage cuts in pursuit of family-friendly job amenities, we claim that adverse labor market conditions at the time of childbearing widen the gender gap...

We document that fluctuations in part-time employment play a major role in movements in hours per worker, especially during cyclical swings in the labor market. Building on this result, we propose a novel representation of the intensive margin based on a stock-flow framework. The evolution of...