Exploiting the differential financing needs across industrial sectors, this paper shows that financing constraints of small businesses in the United States are one of the drivers explaining the unemployment dynamics during the Great Recession. We show that workers in small firms are more likely...

The Beveridge curve depicts a negative relationship between unemployed workers and job vacancies, a robust finding across countries. The position of the economy on the curve gives an idea as to the state of the labour market. The modern underlying theory is the search and matching model, with...

We study the response of domestic unemployment rates to shocks in total factor productivity for economies with high capital mobility and low labour mobility. We show that rapid capital movements across national borders, like those experienced by developed nations in the last twenty years,...

I develop a New Keynesian model in which a type of government multiplier doubles when unemployment rises from 5 percent to 8 percent. This multiplier indicates the additional number of workers employed when one worker is hired in the public sector. Graphically, in equilibrium, an upward-sloping...

We estimate the impulse response of key US macro series to the monetary policy shocks identified by Romer and Romer (2004), allowing the response to depend flexibly on the state of the business cycle. We find strong evidence that the effects of monetary policy on real and nominal variables are...

Mortgage loans are a striking example of a persistent nominal rigidity. As a result, under incomplete markets, monetary policy affects decisions through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and the value of payments on outstanding debt. Observed debt levels and payment to income ratios suggest the...

This paper is motivated by the lack of any obvious relationship between aggregate poverty and unemployment in Great Britain. We derive a framework based on individuals' risks of unemployment and poverty, and how these vary over the economic cycle. Analysing the British Household Panel Survey for...

This article investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy during a credit crunch by estimating a vector autoregression on the US economy. We present evidence that interest rate cuts have a diminished impact on growth, due to impairment in the relationship between monetary policy and the...

We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions interacting with the zero lower bound. We reach this conclusion looking through the lens of a New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate degrees of price...