I conduct an empirical investigation of the cyclicality of the price of labor. Firms employ workers up to the point where workers' marginal revenue product equals the price of labor. If the labor market is a spot market, then the price of labor is the wage. But often workers are contracted for...

Some observers contend that manufacturing activity in rural areas has been more adversely affected than in urban areas by foreign competition. It is true, of course, that the economies of some rural areas have been devastated by closing of key manufacturing plants. Even if plant closings were...

North Carolina's furniture manufacturing industry has contracted in recent years as imports have gained a greater share of the domestic furniture market. Rapid growth of the furniture industry in China and a surge in exports from that country to the United States in particular have contributed...

The absence of timely data on regional manufacturing output makes it difficult to determine what is happening in the manufacturing sector in a particular area. Data comparable to the monthly indexes of U.S. manufacturing output are not generally available for individual states or for specific...

This paper uses factor analytic methods to decompose industrial production (IP) into components arising from aggregate shocks and idiosyncratic sector-specific shocks. An approximate factor model finds that nearly all (90%) of the variability of quarterly growth rates in IP are associated with...

Emerging market economies typically exhibit a procyclical fiscal policy: public expenditures rise (fall) in economic expansions (recessions), whereas tax rates rise (fall) in bad (good) times. Additionally, the business cycle of these economies is characterized by countercyclical default risk....

Macroeconomic forecasts are traditionally stated as point estimates. Retrospective evaluations of forecasts usually assume that the cost of a forecast error increases with the arithmetic magnitude of the error. As a result, measures such as the root-mean-square error (RSME) or the mean absolute...

Two striking facts about international capital flows in emerging economies motivate this paper: (1) Governments hold large amounts of international reserves, for which they obtain a return lower than their borrowing cost. (2) Purchases of domestic assets by nonresidents and purchases of foreign...

We use novel high-frequency panel data on individuals' job applications from an online job posting engine to study (1) whether at the beginning of search job seekers with different levels of education (skill) apply to different jobs, and (2) how search behavior changes as search continues....

We conduct an accounting exercise of the role of worker flows between unemployment, employment, and labor force nonparticipation in the dynamics of the aggregate unemployment rate across four recent recessions: 1982-1983, 1990-1991, 2001, and 2007-2009 (the "Great Recession"). We show that,...