This paper provides a model of "social hysteresis" whereby long, deep recessions demotivate workers and thereby lead them to change their work ethic. In switching from a pro-work to an anti-work identity, their incentives to seek and retain work fall and consequently their employment chances...

In response to the record-breaking COVID19 recession, many governments have adopted unprecedented fiscal stimuli. While countercyclical fiscal policy is effective in fighting conventional recessions, little is known about the effectiveness of fiscal policy in the current environment with...

Prior to 2020, the Great Recession was the most important macroeconomic shock to the United States economy in generations. Millions lost jobs and homes. At its peak, one in ten workers who wanted a job could not find one. On an annual basis, the economy contracted by more than it had since the...

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...

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...

This study analyzes real wage cyclicality for male full-time workers within employer-employee matches in Germany over the period 1984-2004. Five different wage measures are compared: the standard hourly wage rate; hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus pay; the effective wage, which...

We use the panel data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and of the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) to investigate whether risk attitudes have primary (exogenous) determinants that are valid in different stages of economic development and in a different structural context,...

It is often argued that the labor market outcomes of several "problem groups" of German workers suffer disproportionately in an economic downturn. These groups are women, the unskilled, and young and old workers, respectively. Using monthly individual-level data for West Germany for the period...

We study the relationship between cyclical job and worker flows at the plant level using a new data set spanning from 1976-2006. We find that procyclical labor demand explains relatively little of procyclical worker flows. Instead, all plants in the employment growth distribution increase their...