Using the recession recovery point equal to the month when private payrolls first exceeded their previous peak level, this paper argues that it was the negative secular trend in manufacturing jobs that was the most important determinant of the length and depth of the last three...

In this paper, we develop a novel dataset of weekly economic conditions indices for the 50 U.S. states going back to 1987 based on mixed-frequency dynamic factor models with weekly, monthly, and quarterly variables that cover multiple dimensions of state economies. We show that there is...

We provide novel estimates of the timing, magnitudes, and potential determinants of the start of the last housing boom across American neighborhoods and metropolitan areas (MSAs) using a rich new micro data set containing 23 million housing transactions in 94 metropolitan areas between 1993 and...

Previous studies of the U.S. Great Depression find that increased taxation contributed little to either the dramatic downturn or the slow recovery. These studies include only one type of capital taxation: a business profits tax. The contribution is much greater when the analysis includes other...

Digital technologies may make some tasks, jobs and firms more resilient to unanticipated shocks. We extract data from over 200 million U.S. job postings to construct an index for firms' resilience to the Covid-19 pandemic by assessing the work-from-home (WFH) feasibility of their labor demand....

Based on patterns of employment transitions, we identify three different types of workers in the US labor market: α's β's and γ's. Workers of type α make up over half of all workers, are most likely to remain on the same job for more than 2 years and, when they become unemployed, typically...

Previous research has documented that Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications and awards increase during economic downturns and that expanded access to SSDI leads to a reduction in employment. We build on these insights and investigate to what extent differential access to SSDI...

Do recessions speed up or impede productivity-enhancing reallocation? To investigate this question, we use U.S. linked employer-employee data to examine how worker flows contribute to productivity growth over the business cycle. We find that in expansions high-productivity firms grow faster...

With "2020 hindsight," the 2000s housing cycle is not a boom-bust but rather a boom- bust-rebound at both the national level and across cities. We argue this pattern reflects a larger role for fundamentally-rooted explanations than previously thought. We construct a city-level long-run...

This paper investigates whether U.S. government spending multipliers differ according to two potentially important features of the economy: (1) the amount of slack and (2) whether interest rates are near the zero lower bound. We shed light on these questions by analyzing new quarterly historical...