This paper attempts to add to the understanding of changes in the magnitude of business cycle fluctuations by examining disaggregated employment data. Specifically, we use a stochastic variance approach on monthly employment data for the 1946-1996 period to highlight two stylized facts of...

How much of aggregate employment fluctuations is due to plants destroying and then recreating the same jobs over the cycle and how much is due to some plants permanently destroying jobs in a recession and other plants permanently creating jobs in an expansion? This paper decomposes plant level...

The informal sector, which produces legal goods but does not comply with government regulations, is a functioning part of all economies, with a proportion of the labor force ranging from 17 percent in OECD countries to 60 percent in developing countries. Using a dynamic model that includes an...

This paper models a firm's choice of employment adjustment costs as one component of its choice of production process. In making a one-time choice of production process, firms tradeoff increased flexibility--the reduced cost of changing levels of production--against the diminished efficiency of...

We use a unique data set on employee turnover by industry in Arizona to test competing theories of turnover. We find that industries with lower establishment survival rates have more employee turnover, even after controlling for differences in the distribution of employee tenure. This result is...

Workers who lose their jobs can become re-employed either by being recalled to their previous employers or by finding new jobs. Workers' chances for recall should influence their job search strategies, so the rates of exit from unemployment by these two routes should be directly related. We...

This paper presents a framework to study movements in the matching efficiency of the labor market and highlights two observable factors affecting matching efficiency: (i) unemployment composition and (ii) dispersion in labor market conditions, the fact that tight labor markets coexist with slack...

Using a band pass filter, this paper estimates plant-level job flows at different frequencies and examines the characteristics of the high frequency (transitory) and low frequency (permanent) component flows. Because high frequency employment movements, which likely result in changes in the...