Hiring is a costly activity reflecting firms' investment in their workers. Micro-data shows that hiring costs involve production disruption. Thus, cyclical fluctuations in the value of output, induced by price frictions, have consequences for the optimal allocation of hiring activities. We...

How do wages respond to financial recessions? Based on a dynamic macroeconomic model with frictions in the labor and the financial market, we address two prominent mechanism through which firms' financial constraints amplify unemployment and explore their effect on wages. First, the financial...

This paper provides a new explanation of why inflation is sluggish in response to aggregate demand shocks and why aggregate output changes as result of such shocks. We argue that these phenomena are related to lags between inputs and outputs in the production process, "production lags" for...

Critics of the H-1B program for high-skilled workers argue that the program restricts immigrant job mobility and lacks a vehicle for adjusting the number of visas during a recession. We study the job mobility of highly-skilled Indian IT guest workers and provide new evidence on their inter-firm...

In the Great Recession most OECD countries used short-time work (publicly subsidized working time reductions) to counteract a steep increase in unemployment. We show that short-time work can actually save jobs. However, there is an important distinction to be made: While the rule-based component...

This study uses aggregate data for 23 OECD countries over the 1960-1997 period to examine the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and fatalities. The main finding is that total mortality and deaths from several common causes increase when labor markets strengthen. For instance,...

Using a large panel of administrative records this study confirms the predictions of the ranking model of Blanchard and Diamond (1994) that an individual?s probability of leaving unemployment decreases with unemployment duration and increases with economic growth. However, the ranking model of...

This study examines individuals? unemployment experiences from the age of 18 up to the age of 35 using a large panel of administrative records on unemployment related benefit claims of men in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. The main focus is on the extent to which individuals?...

The paper explores the consequences of macroeconomic policy for labor market outcomes in the presence of frictions. It shows how policy may be useful in overriding frictions, as well as how it might generate adverse outcomes. The analysis looks at the main tools of macroeconomic policy and...