This paper proposes a strategy to measure, in a unified setting, how the job finding probability and the job separation probability conditional on observable and unobservable individual characteristics varies over the business cycle. Recent papers by Shimer and Hall point out how new...

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...

This paper explores wage-setting in the presence of asymmetric information. Firms know their own productivity, while workers only know the distribution of productivity in the economy. Although there is unemployment in equilibrium, the labor market is competitive in the sense of Moen (1997):...

This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of firms' investment composition choices in the presence of credit constraints. Following a negative and persistent aggregate productivity shock, firms shift into short-term investments because they produce more pledgeable output and because they...

We examine the relationship between institutions, culture and cyclical fluctuations for a sample of 45 European, Middle Eastern and North African countries. Better governance is associated with shorter and less severe contractions and milder expansions. Certain cultural traits, such as lack of...

We investigate macroeconomic fluctuations in the Mediterranean basin, their similarities and convergence. A model with four indicators, roughly covering the West, the East and the Middle East and the North Africa portions of the Mediterranean, characterizes well the historical experience since...