Using 1979-2011 Current Population Survey data for the United States and 1975-2011 New Earnings Survey data for Great Britain, we study wage behavior in both countries, with particular attention to the Great Recession. Real wages are procyclical in both countries, but the procyclicality of real...

One of the strongest trends in recent macroeconomic modeling of labor market fluctuations is to treat unemployment inflows as acyclical. This trend stems in large part from an influential paper by Shimer on "Reassessing the Ins and Outs of Unemployment," i.e., the extent to which increased...

This paper formalizes and assesses empirically the implications of widely observed evidence for downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR). It shows how a model of DNWR informed by diverse evidence for worker resistance to nominal wage cuts is nevertheless consistent with weak macroeconomic effects....

From the perspective of a wide range of labor market outcomes, the recession that began in 2007 represents the deepest downturn in the postwar era. Early on, the nature of labor market adjustment displayed a notable resemblance to that observed in past severe downturns. During the latter half of...

We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow from unemployment for fourteen OECD economies using publicly available data. We then devise a method to decompose changes in unemployment into contributions accounted for by changes in inflow and outflow rates for...

This paper emphasizes the role of wage growth in shaping work incentives. It provides an analytical framework for labor supply in the presence of a return to labor market experience and aggregate productivity growth. A key finding of the theory is that there is an interaction between these two...

This paper introduces a notion of fir m size into a search and matching model with endogenous job destruction. The outcome is a rich, yet analytically tractable framework that can be used to analyze a broad set of features of both the cross section and the dynamics of the aggregate labor market....

Existing theoretical models of intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status have strong implications for the association of outcomes across multiple generations of a family. These models, however, are highly stylized and do not encompass many plausible avenues for transmission across...

The purpose of this paper is to help empirical economists think through when and how to weight the data used in estimation. We start by distinguishing two purposes of estimation: to estimate population descriptive statistics and to estimate causal effects. In the former type of research,...

In the most thorough study to date on wage cyclicality among job stayers, Devereux%u2019s (2001) analysis of men in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics produced two puzzling findings: (1) the real wages of salaried workers are noncyclical, and (2) wage cyclicality among hourly workers differs...