Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

Nowcasting has been a challenge in the recent economic crisis. We introduce the Toll Index, a new monthly indicator for business cycle forecasting and demonstrate its relevance using German data. The index measures the monthly transportation activity performed by heavy transport vehicles across...

The labor search and matching model plays a growing role in macroeconomic analysis. This paper provides a critical, selective survey of the literature. Four fundamental questions are explored: how are unemployment, job vacancies, and employment determined as equilibrium phenomena? What...

How do wages respond to financial recessions? Based on a dynamic macroeconomic model with frictions in the labor and the financial market, we address two prominent mechanism through which firms' financial constraints amplify unemployment and explore their effect on wages. First, the financial...

Much of macroeconomics is concerned with the allocation of physical capital, human capital, and labor over time and across people. The decisions on savings, education, and labor supply that generate these variables are made within families. Yet the family (and decision-making in families) is...

U.S. CPS gross flows data indicate that in recessions firms actually increase their hiring rates from the pools of the unemployed and out of the labor force. Why so? The paper provides an explanation by studying the optimal recruiting behavior of the representative firm. This behavior is a...

There exists a persistent disagreement in the literature over the effect of business cycles on economic growth. This paper offers a solution to this disagreement, suggesting that volatility carries a positive direct effect, but also a negative indirect effect, operating through the insurance...

Countercyclical unemployment benefit extensions in the United States act as a propagation mechanism, contributing to both the high persistence of unemployment and its weak correlation with productivity. We show this by modifying an otherwise standard frictional model of the labor market to...

Recent dynamic contracting models of downward real wage rigidity with "equal treatment" – newly hired workers cannot price themselves into jobs by undercutting incumbents – imply that real wages are relatively rigid in "bad" times but upwardly flexible during "good" times. We use an...

We develop an adjustment procedure to construct U.S. monthly time series of involuntary part-time employment stocks and flows from 1976 until today. Armed with these new data, we provide a comprehensive account of the dynamics of involuntary part-time work. Transitions from full-time to...