Mercan, Yusuf; Schoefer, Benjamin; Sedlácek, Petr - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2021
In recessions, unemployment increases despite the--perhaps counterintuitive--fact that the number of unemployed workers … finding jobs expands. We propose a theory of unemployment fluctuations resting on this countercyclicality of gross flows from … unemployment into employment. In recessions, the abundance of new hires "congests" the jobs the unemployed fill--diminishing their …