The US labor market witnessed two apparently unrelated secular movements in the last 30 years: a decline in unemployment between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and a decline in participation since the early 2000s. Using CPS micro data and a stock- flow accounting framework, we show that a...

The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper develops an analytical...

Shimer (2005a) claims that the Mortensen-Pissarides search model of unemployment lacks an ampiflication mechanism because it cannot generate the observed business cycle fluctuations in unemployment given labor productivity shocks of plausible magnitude. This paper argues that part of the problem...

This paper explores the sources of inflation in Sub-Saharan Africa by examining the relationship between inflation, the output gap and the real money gap. Using heterogeneous panel co-integration estimation techniques, we estimate co-integrating vectors for the production function and the real...

This paper presents new empirical evidence on the cyclical behavior of US unemployment that poses a challenge to standard search and matching models. The correlation between cyclical unemployment and the cyclical component of labor productivity switched sign at the beginning of the Great...

This paper explores the sources of inflation in Sub-Saharan Africa by examining the relationship between inflation, the output gap, and the real money gap. Using heterogeneous panel cointegration estimation techniques, we estimate cointegrating vectors for the production function and the real...

Despite intense scrutiny estimates of the government spending multiplier remain highly uncertain with values ranging from 0.5 to 2. While a fiscal consolidation is generally assumed to have the same (mirror-image) effect as a fiscal expansion, we show that relaxing this assumption is crucial to...

How much of aggregate employment fluctuations is due to plants destroying and then recreating the same jobs over the cycle and how much is due to some plants permanently destroying jobs in a recession and other plants permanently creating jobs in an expansion? This paper decomposes plant level...

I use the term workweek flexibility to describe the ease of changing output by altering the number of hours per worker. Despite the fact that workweek flexibility is potentially important for understanding the cyclical behavior of marginal cost and prices, as well as cyclical movements in hours...

Because plant deaths destroy specific capital with large local economic impacts and potentially important macroeconomic effects, understanding the causes of deaths and, in particular, why they are concentrated in cyclical downturns, is important. The reallocation-timing hypothesis posits that...