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...

How do alternative job opportunities affect teacher quality? We provide the first causal evidence on this question by exploiting business cycle conditions at career start as a source of exogenous variation in the outside options of potential teachers. Unlike prior research, we directly assess...

We adapt the models of Menzio and Moen (2010) and Snell and Thomas (2010) to consider a labour market in which firms can commit to wage contracts but cannot commit not to replace incumbent workers. Workers are risk averse, so that there exists an incentive for firms to smooth wages. Real wages...

In the presence of dispersed information, agents may decide to take into account the actions of other agents because of the possible additional information conveyed by these actions. We call the act of using other agents' actions in the individual decision process social learning. This paper...

The cyclicality of real wages has important implications for the validity of competing business cycle theories. However, the empirical evidence on the aggregate level is inconclusive. Using a threshold vector autoregressive model for the US and Germany to condition the relationship between real...

This paper analyses optimal income taxes over the business cycle under a balanced-budget restriction, for low, middle and high income households. A model incorporating capital-skill complementarity in production and differential access to capital and labour markets is de-veloped to capture the...