This study investigates Okun’s law in OECD countries by examining estimates for male and female age cohorts for the period 1998–2012. We find that the estimated Okun coefficients are not always statistically significant for each subgroup of the population. Our results also highlight a...

This paper aims at investigating the causes of the observed departure of employment path from the GDP movements occurred in US in the late of 2008 onwards. Starting from a production function approach, and assuming that the TFP growth is explained by variables linked to the business cycle, we...

There is a long and detailed history of attempts to understand what causes crime. One of the most prominent strands of this literature has sought to better understand the relationship between economic conditions and crime. An economic argument is that in an attempt to maintain consumption in the...

This paper suggests that a model in which firms face credit constraints on hiring labor can explain both the behavior of the labor wedge and the “jobless recoveries” phenomenon of the last three recessions. Using the corporate credit spread as a measure of firms’ credit conditions, I show...

The labor market in Germany is more sclerotic and volatile than in the US. We show theoretically that sclerosis and large volatilities are two sides of the same coin. Both may be driven by large hiring costs and low quit rates.

Hours volatility has changed non-monotonically across skill groups since the mid-1980s. The welfare cost of business cycles of mid-skilled workers became similar to that of high-skilled workers, while the relative welfare cost of low- to high-skilled workers remains very high.

This paper suggests that a model in which firms face credit constrains on hiring labor can explain both the behavior of the labor wedge and the “jobless recoveries” phenomenon of the last three recessions. Using the corporate credit spread as a measure of firms' credit conditions, I show...

Arguing that crises are similar if they are predictable from historical experience, we employ panel logit models to examine similarities in the run-ups to the current global financial crisis and historical banking crises. Asset bubbles are the most common precursors.

We challenge the assumption in the literature of constant housing supply elasticities across housing expansions. Using a time-varying parameter (TVP)-VAR model on monthly US data since the early 1990s, we find that the response of housing supply to an expansionary monetary policy shock relative...

This paper examines the Turkish wage curve using individual data from the Household Labor Force Survey including 26 NUTS-2 regions over the period 2005–2008. We find an unemployment elasticity of −0.099, with a higher elasticity for younger, less educated, less experienced and female workers.