Over the past two decades, technological progress in the United States has been biased towards skilled labor. What does this imply for business cycles? We construct a quarterly skill premium from the CPS and use it to identify skill-biased technology shocks in a VAR with long-run restrictions....

The present paper revisits a property embedded in most dynamic macroeconomic models: the stationarity of hours worked. First, I argue that, contrary to what is often believed, there are many reasons why hours could be non-stationary in those models, while preserving the property of balanced...

The time series fit of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models often suffers from restrictions on the long-run dynamics that are at odds with the data. Relaxing these restrictions can close the gap between DSGE models and vector autoregressions. This paper modifies a simple...

In this paper we estimate a New-Keynesian DSGE model with heterogeneity in price and wage setting behavior. In a recent study, Coibion and Gorodnichenko (2011) develop a DSGE model, in which firms follow four different types of price setting schemes: sticky prices, sticky information, rule of...

We argue that firms’ balance sheets were instrumental in the propagation of shocks during the Great Recession. Using establishment-level data, we show that firms that tightened their debt capacity in the run-up (“high-leverage firms”) exhibit a significantly larger decline in employment in...

Germany experienced an even deeper fall in GDP in the Great Recession than the United States, with little employment loss. Employers’ reticence to hire in the preceding expansion, associated in part with a lack of confidence it would last, contributed to an employment shortfall equivalent to...

This paper considers new business start-up activity within a stochastic equilibrium model of unemployment. The resulting job creation process is both natural and tractable, and generates equilibrium unemployment and vacancy dynamics which match the volatility and persistence observed in the...

This paper develops a theory characterizing the effects of fiscal policy on unemployment over the business cycle. The theory is based on a model of equilibrium unemployment in which jobs are rationed in recessions. Fiscal policy in the form of government spending on public-sector jobs reduces...

This paper presents a theory of the monetary transmission mechanism in a monetary version of Farmer’s (2009) model in which there are multiple equilibrium unemployment rates. The model has two equations in common with the new-Keynesian model; the optimizing IS curve and the policy rule. It...

Fluctuations in firms' revenues reduce firms' viability and are costly from a social welfare point of view even when agents are risk neutral if (i) the decision to continue operating a firm is not efficient at the margin so that fluctuations shorten firms' life expectancy (because they increase...