This paper uses several large cross-sectional data sources and a new approach to estimate midlife effects of entering the labor market in a recession on mortality by cause and various measures of socioeconomic status. We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early...

Unemployment recoveries in the US have been inexorable. Between 1948 and 2019, the annual reduction in the unemployment rate during cyclical recoveries was fairly tightly distributed around 0.1 log points per year. The economy seems to have an irresistible force toward restoring full employment....

Potential workers are classified as unemployed if they seek work but are not working. The unemployed population contains two groups - those with jobs and those without jobs. Those with jobs are on furlough or temporary layoff. This group expanded tremendously in April 2020, at the trough of the...

This paper examines the importance of sectoral reallocation and cyclical unemployment; in the postwar US economy. It develops a new measure of reallocation shocks based on the variance of industry stock market excess returns over time, termed cross section volatility. Data on unemployment and...

This paper argues that a broad class of search models cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies in response to shocks of a plausible magnitude. In the U.S., the vacancy-unemployment ratio is 20 times as volatile as average labor...

Regionalspezifische Wirtschaftsstrukturen haben einen Einfluss auf die Resilienz von Regionen in konjunkturellen Krisenzeiten. Noch unklar ist in diesem Zusammenhang die relative Bedeutung kleinerer Unternehmen. Haben sie hinsichtlich der Arbeitslosigkeitsentwicklung in der Corona-Pandemie als...

Recent work by David Lilien has argued that the existence of a strong positive correlation between the dispersion of employment growth rates across sectors (G) and the unemployment rate implies that shifts in demand from some sectors to others are responsible for a substantial fraction of...

This paper uses data on unemployment rates and job vacancy rates to measure structural/frictional and demand-deficient components of unemployment rate differences across local labor markets. Data on occupational and industrial distributions of unemployed workers and vacant jobs, as well as on...

Whenever unemployment stays high for an extended period, it is common to see analyses, statements, and rebuttals about the extent to which the high unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This essay views the Beveridge Curve pattern of unemployment and vacancy rates and the related matching...

This paper compares the cyclical behaviour of male real wages in Germany and the UK using the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984-2002 and the British Household Panel Survey 1991-2004. We distinguish between job stayers (remaining in the same job), and within- and between-company job movers....

This paper studies the role of labor market institutions on unemployment and on the cyclical properties of job flows. We construct an intertemporal general equilibrium model with search unemployment and endogenous job turnover, and examine the consequences of introducing an unemployment benefit,...

The paper attempts at disentangling the main sources of the rise in the Italian unemployment rate over the last four decades on the basis of a small model a la Layard-Nickell, identified and estimated using a structural VAR approach. Unemployment movements are assumed to be driven by fully...

Sweden has experienced a substantial increase in temporary work over the 1990s, with most of the rise occurring during a severe macroeconomic recession with mass unemployment. By the early 1990s, workers on fixed-term contracts accounted for 10 percent of the number of employees; by the end of...

We study individual job-separations and their associated destination states for all individuals in the private sector in Denmark for the period 1980 to 1995 and account for the cyclical flows. We find that individual and workplace characteristics as well as business cycle effects are important...

Standard macroeconomic models underpredict the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. A common solution is to assume wages are rigid. We explore whether this explanation is consistent with the data. We show that the wage of newly hired workers, unlike the aggregate wage, is volatile and...

This paper analyzes the cyclical properties of worker flows in Brazil and Mexico, two important developing countries with large unregulated or "informal" sectors. It generates three stylized facts that are critical to the accurate modeling of the sector and which suggest the need to rethink the...

A search-theoretic general equilibrium model of frictional unemployment is shown to be consistent with some of the key regularities of unemployment over the business cycle. In the model the return to a job moves stochastically. Agents can choose either to quit and search for a better job, or...

This paper offers an analysis of cyclical and secular patterns in job turnover using establishment-level data. We provide evidence from multiple data sets that show that the job turnover process is markedly different over time and across regions. Over time, we find that employment fluctuations...

We model worker heterogeneity in the rents from being employed in a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model of matching and unemployment. We show that heterogeneity, reflecting differences in match quality and worker assets, reduces the extent of fluctuations in separations and unemployment. We find...

Potential workers are classified as unemployed if they seek work but are not working. The unemployed population contains two groups—those with jobs and those without jobs. Those with jobs are on furlough or temporary layoff. This group expanded tremendously in April 2020. They wait out periods...

The effect of business cycles is not experienced equally by all workers and official statistics usually do not uncover the dramatic differences in the severity of the cyclical impacts for different groups. Yet, research on the relationship between business cycles and (un)employment or...

This paper uses several large cross-sectional data sources and a new approach to estimate midlife effects of entering the labor market in a recession on mortality by cause and various measures of socioeconomic status. We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early...

This paper uses several large cross-sectional data sources and a new approach to estimate midlife effects of entering the labor market in a recession on mortality by cause and various measures of socioeconomic status. We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early...

This paper uses several large cross-sectional data sources and a new approach to estimate midlife effects of entering the labor market in a recession on mortality by cause and various measures of socioeconomic status. We find that cohorts coming of age during the deep recession of the early...

This paper develops new estimates of flows into and out of unemployment that allow for unobserved heterogeneity across workers as well as direct effects of unemployment duration on unemployment-exit probabilities. Unlike any previous paper in this literature, we develop a complete dynamic...

What is the driving force behind the cyclical behavior of unemployment and vacancies? What is the relation between job-creation incentives of firms and stock market valuations? We answer these questions in a model with time-varying risk, modeled as a small and variable probability of an economic...

Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro and micro data. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional...

We revisit the role of temporary layoffs in the business cycle, motivated by their unprecedented surge during the pandemic recession. We first measure the contribution of temporary layoffs to unemployment dynamics over the period 1979 to the present. While many have emphasized a stabilizing...

This paper proposes a hidden state Markov model (HMM) that incorporates workers' unobserved labor market attachment into the analysis of labor market dynamics. Unlike previous literature, which typically assumes that a worker's observed labor force status follows a first-order Markov process,...