Canadian unemployment rate in booms and busts. We find strong evidence in favor of asymmetric spillover effects. Unemployment … of the 2-year ahead forecast error of the Canadian unemployment rate in periods of slack vs. just 2% during economic … of the latter, lead to a temporary increase in the Canadian unemployment rate. Evidence of asymmetric spillover effects …

increase in economic policy uncertainty on unemployment in recessions and expansions. We find the response of unemployment to … be statistically and economically larger in recessions. A state-contingent forecast error variance decomposition analysis … confirms that the contribution of EPU shocks to the volatility of unemployment at business cycle frequencies is markedly larger …

In recessions, unemployment increases despite the - perhaps counterintuitive - fact that the number of unemployed … excess earnings losses from job displacement and from graduating during recessions, and the insensitivity of unemployment to … workers finding jobs expands. On net, unemployment rises only because even more workers lose their jobs. We propose a theory …

implied by new unemployment claims: we estimate 20 million lost jobs by April 8th, far more than jobs lost over the entire … rise in the unemployment rate over the corresponding period to be surprisingly small, only about 2 percentage points. Third …

We study optimal government spending in a business cycle model with frictional unemployment. The Ramsey optimal policy …

U3, the official unemployment rate, is an inadequate gauge of labor-market slack and the extent to which it misinforms … varies substantially over the business cycle. The U6 unemployment rate is usually about 4 percentage points above U3. However …

unemployment benefits reduce unemployment? Using a recent labour market reform in Germany as background, we find that an enhanced … effectiveness of the PEA explains about 20% of the observed post-reform unemployment decline. The role of unemployment benefit … the PEA could have had an even higher impact on unemployment reduction if there had been less focus on long …