One of the goals of stabilization policy is to reduce the output gap—the difference between potential and actual output—during downturns. Potential output, however, is an unobserved variable whose definition can vary. For example, some view potential output as the level of output...

The slow recovery of the labor market in the aftermath of the Great Recession highlighted mismatch, the misallocation of workers across space or across industries. We consider the historical evolution of regional mismatch. We construct MSA-level unemployment rates and vacancy data using...

This paper estimates city-level employment cycles for 58 large U.S. cities and documents the substantial cross-city variation in the timing, lengths, and frequencies of their employment contractions. It also shows how the spread of city-level contractions associated with U.S. recessions has...

In this paper, we propose a new family of multivariate loss functions that can be used to test the rationality of vector forecasts without assuming independence across variables. When only one variable is of interest, the loss function reduces to the flexible asymmetric family proposed by...