This paper provides a cross-country comparison of life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations. We draw our inference from household panel data sets for the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about...

This paper analyzes the role of the extensive vis-à-vis the intensive margin of labor adjustment in Germany and in the United States. The contribution is twofold. First, we provide an update of older US studies and confirm the view that the extensive margin (i.e., the adjustment in the number...

Recessions lead to short-term job loss, lower levels of happiness and decreasing income levels. There is growing evidence that workers who first join the labour market during economic downturns suffer from poor job matches that have a sustained detrimental effect on their wages and career...

We document that fluctuations in part-time employment play a major role in movements in hours per worker, especially during cyclical swings in the labor market. Building on this result, we propose a novel representation of the intensive margin based on a stock-flow framework. The evolution of...

Not only the level of aggregate unemployment but also the properties of its dynamics are an important topic in macroeconomics and labor economics. Several models like e.g. matching models with endogenous job destruction explicitly predict an asymmetric pattern in the evolution of unemployment,...

This paper establishes stylized facts about the cyclicality of real consumer wages and real producer wages in Germany. As detrending methods we apply the deterministic trend model, the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, the Hodrick-Prescott filter, the Baxter-King filter and the structural time...

Using the approach suggested by Gabaix (Econometrica 2011) this paper demonstrates that idiosyncratic shocks in the largest firms are important for an understanding of aggregate volatility in German manufacturing industries. The implications of this finding for theoretical and empirical research...

We analyze whether start-up rates in different industries systematically change with business cycle variables. Using a unique data set at the industry level, we mostly find correlations that are consistent with counter-cyclical influences of the business cycle on entries in both innovative and...

Based largely on industry-level aggregate statistics, the prevailing view, and one that has strongly influenced macroeconomic thought, is that real wages during the cycle containing the Great Depression are either acyclical or countercyclical. Does this finding hold-up when more micro data are...