This paper studies the long-term effect of business cycle, employment rate and employment growth rate on later wages and promotions. Using Swedish employer-employee match data, we find that workers who enter the labor market during a recovery phase of a business cycle (when the employment rate...

This paper suggests that the interaction between firms’ entry and exit decisions and variation in the degree of competition gives rise to endogenous procyclical movements in measured total factor productivity (TFP). Based on this result, the paper suggests a simple structural method for the...

We investigate the consequences of demographic change for business cycle analysis. We find that changes in the age composition of the labor force account for a significant fraction of the variation in business cycle volatility observed in the U.S. and other G7 economies. During the postwar...

We explore the business cycle implications of expectation shocks and of two well-known psychological biases, optimism and overconfidence. The expectations of optimistic agents are biased toward good outcomes, while overconfident agents overestimate the precision of the signals that they receive....