U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since 2000. We quantify the statistical impact of income, unemployment, house prices, credit scores, debt, financial assets, expectations, foreclosures, and inequality on county-level consumption growth for four subperiods: the "dot-com...

This paper disciplines a model with search over match quality using microeconomic evidence on worker mobility patterns and wage dynamics. In addition to capturing these individual data, the model provides an explanation for aggregate labor market patterns. Poor match quality among first jobs...

The unemployed in the United States appear to allocate time to job search activities regardless of the stance of the economy. Drawing on the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2014, I document that the unemployed increase their search intensity only slightly if at all during recessions....

We use a novel data set on firm vacancies and job seekers from a Mexican government job placement service to analyze whether changes in matching frictions can explain the large and persistent increase in Mexican unemployment after the 2008 global financial crisis. We find evidence of a...

The vast majority of studies on the earnings of displaced workers use a control group of continuously employed workers to examine the effects of initial displacements. This approach implies long-lived earnings reductions following displacement even if these effects are not persistent,...

Using administrative data from the Spanish Social Security Administration, we analyse the nature and stability of job matches starting during the economic boom in 2005 and during the recession in 2009. We compare the individual, job and firm characteristics in the two samples and estimate a...

The Great Recession is characterized by a GDP-decline that was unprecedented in the past decades. This paper discusses the implications of the Great Recession analyzing labor market data from 20 OECD countries. Comparing the Great Recession with the 1980s recession it is concluded that there is...

This paper measures flow rates into and out of unemployment for Turkey and uses them to estimate the unemployment rate trend, that is, the unemployment rate to which the economy converges in the long run. In doing so, the paper explores the role of labor force participation in determining the...

This paper evaluates the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that leverage unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches — the more reduced-form approach of Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) and the...

This paper argues that the value of unemployment insurance (UI) can be decomposed into a liquidity component and an insurance component. While the liquidity component captures the value of relieving the cost to access liquidity during unemployment, the insurance component captures the value of...