This paper studies employment decisions at U.S. companies over the 2007-2012 period, during and after the Great Recession. To this end, I build a panel dataset that matches publicly-listed companies' financial reports to their announced layoff episodes. Using limited dependent variable...

This paper discusses various concepts of unemployment rate benchmarks that are frequently used by policymakers for assessing the current state of the economy as it relates to the pursuit of both price stability and maximum employment. In particular, we propose two broad categories of...

Using an annual panel of US states over the period 1982-2014, we estimate the response of macroeconomic variables to a shock to the number of new firms (startups). We find that these shocks have significant effects that persist for many years on real GDP, productivity, and population. This...

This paper presents a model in which mismatch employment arises in a constrained efficient equilibrium. In the decentralized economy, however, mismatch gives rise to a congestion externality whereby heterogeneous job seekers fail to internalize how their individual actions affect the labor...

A large literature documents declining measures of business dynamism including high-growth young firm activity and job reallocation. A distinct literature describes a slowdown in the pace of aggregate labor productivity growth. We relate these patterns by studying changes in productivity growth...

The pace of job reallocation has declined in all U.S. sectors since 2000. In standard models, aggregate job reallocation depends on (a) the dispersion of idiosyncratic productivity shocks faced by businesses and (b) the marginal responsiveness of businesses to those shocks. Using several novel...

What is the nature of labor income risk facing households? We answer this question using detailed administrative data on household earnings from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. By analyzing total household labor earnings as well as each member's earnings, we offer several new findings. One,...

This paper explores the role that unobserved heterogeneity within an observed category plays in the dynamics of disaggregate unemployment and in the cross-sectional differences across individuals of the duration of unemployment spells. The distribution of unobserved heterogeneity is...