We develop prototype job-to-job flow measures to provide new evidence on labor turnover and earnings dynamics in the Great Recession. We find a sharp drop in job mobility in the Great Recession, much sharper than the previous recession, and higher earnings penalties for job transitions with an...

This paper explores investment fluctuations due to discrete changes in a plant's capital stock. The resulting aggregate investment dynamics are surprisingly rich, reflecting the interaction between a replacement cycle, the cross-sectional distribution of the age of the capital stock, and an...

We investigate the nature of selection and productivity growth in industries where we observe producer-level quantities and prices separately. We show there are important differences between revenue and physical productivity. Because physical productivity is inversely correlated with price while...

This paper investigates the effect of idiosyncratic (firm-level) policy distortions on aggregate outcomes. Exploiting harmonized firm‑level data for a number of countries, we show that there is substantial and systematic cross‑country variation in the within-industry covariance...

Theory restricts short-run job creation and destruction responses and cumulative employment and job reallocation responses to allocative and aggregate shocks. We formulate these restrictions and implement them for postwar data on U.S. manufacturing. Allocative shocks are the main driving force...

Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses and few gains in operating performance. To evaluate these claims, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers US buyouts from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and...

This paper contrasts the dynamic properties of an imperfectly competitive economy with a representative agent, real business cycle model. For both economies, inventories are the important dynamic linkage. The predictions of these models with regards to the comovement of employment across sectors...

The authors study an economy in which producers incur resource costs to replace depreciated machines. The process of costly replacement and depreciation creates endogenous fluctuations in productivity, employment, and output of a single producer. The authors explore the spillover effects of...

This paper studies quarterly employment flows of approximately 10,000 U.S. manufacturing establishments. The authors use establishments' hours-week to construct measures of the deviation between desired and actual employment and use these as the establishments' main state variables. The main...