This paper provides new interpretations of the effects of rising economic turbulence—an increase in the rate of skill depreciation upon job loss—and its interaction with labor market institutions. We have three main results, based on a life‐cycle model with labor market frictions and labor...

This paper provides a unified account of the trends in unemployment and labor force participation pertaining to the employment experience of older male workers during the past half-century. We build an equilibrium life-cycle model with labor-market frictions and an operative labor supply margin,...

We extend Nakamura et al. (2019, 2020)'s approach of using the publicly available microdata files of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to construct worker transition rates across employment, unemployment, and inactivity. Our approach involves estimating and applying a scaling factor that has been...

A search-theoretic model of the labor market with idiosyncratic fluctuations in hours worked, search both off- and on-the-job, and multiple jobholding is developed. Taking on a second job entails a commitment to hold onto the primary employer, enabling the worker to use the primary job as her...

We document a new fact about the cyclical behavior of aggregate hours. Using microdata for the US and the UK, we show that changes in hours per worker are driven by fluctuations in part-time employment, which are in turn explained by the cyclical behavior of transitions between full-time and...

We document a new fact about the cyclical behavior of aggregate hours. Using microdata for the US and the UK, we show that changes in hours per worker are driven by fluctuations in part-time employment, which are in turn explained by the cyclical behavior of transitions between full-time and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an explosion of research using private-sector datasets to measure business dynamics and employment in real-time. Yet questions remain about the representativeness of these datasets and how to distinguish business openings and closings from sample churn – i.e.,...

Although the size of the labor force is nearly acyclical, worker flows between employment and unemployment on the one hand and inactivity on the other hand fluctuate significantly over the business cycle. After reviewing these facts, this paper lays out a job-search model to uncover the...