Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

Recent research in macroeconomics emphasizes the role of wage rigidity in ac- counting for the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. We use worker-level data from the CPS to measure the sensitivity of wages of newly hired workers to changes in aggregate labor market conditions. The wage of...

We lay out a small open economy version of the Calvo sticky price model, and show how the equilibrium dynamics can be reduced to a tractable canonical system in domestic inflation and the output gap. We employ this framework to analyze the macroeconomic implications of three alternative...

This paper argues that in the presence of intersectoral input-output linkages, microeconomic idiosyncratic shocks may lead to aggregate fluctuations. In particular, it shows that, as the economy becomes more disaggregated, the rate at which aggregate volatility decays is determined by the...

We document three changes in postwar US macroeconomic dynamics: (i) the procyclicality of labor productivity vanished, (ii) the relative volatility of employment rose, and (iii) the relative (and absolute) volatility of the real wage rose. We propose an explanation for all three changes that is...

The matching function - a key building block in models of labor market frictions - implies that the job finding rate depends only on labor market tightness. We estimate such a matching function and …find that the relation, although remarkably stable over 1967-2007, broke down spectacularly...

This paper points out an empirical puzzle that arises when an RBC economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment. The standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment, or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to labor market...

The standard New Keynesian model with staggered wage setting is shown to imply a simple dynamic relation between wage inflation and unemployment. Under some assumptions, that relation takes a form similar to that found in empirical wage equationsstarting from Phillips(1958) original workand may...

Existing models of equilibrium unemployment with endogenous labor market participation are complex, generate procyclical unemployment rates and cannot match unemployment variability relative to GDP. We embed endogenous participation in a simple, tractable job market matching model, show...

We construct and calibrate a general equilibrium business cycle model with unemployment and precautionary saving. We compute the cost of business cycles and locate the optimum in a set of simple cyclical fiscal policies. Our economy exhibits productivity shocks, giving firms an incentive to hire...