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...

The user cost of labor captures the hiring wage and the expected effect of the economic conditions at the time of hiring on future wages. In search and matching models, I show that it is the user cost and not the wage that is weighted against the worker's marginal product at the time of hiring;...

Many cases of successful economic development, such as South Korea, exhibit long periods of sustained capital accumulation rates. This empirical feature is at odds with the standard neoclassical growth model which predicts initially high and then declining capital accumulation rates. We show...

The opportunity cost of waiting for goods to be produced and sold increases with the cost of financing. This channel is evident in emerging market crises, when industries that use more inventories lose more of their output and lag behind in the recovery. An open economy model with lags in the...

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...

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the nature of U.S. business cycles changed in important ways, as made evident by distinctive shifts in the comovement and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates. These include labor productivity, hours, output, and inventories. Unlike the widely documented...

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,...

We use Bayesian time-varying parameters structural VARs with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in both the reduced-form and the structural correlations between business inventories and either sales growth or the real interest rate in the United States during both the interwar and the...

Shimer (2012) accounts for the volatility of unemployment based on a model of homogeneous unemployment. Using data on short-term unemployment he finds that most of unemployment volatility is accounted for by variations in the exit rate from unemployment. The assumption of homogeneous exit rates...