What is the impact of time-varying business uncertainty on economic activity? Using partly confidential business survey data from the U.S. and Germany in structural VARs, we find that positive innovations to business uncertainty lead to prolonged declines in economic activity. In contrast, their...

Investors rebalance their portfolios as their views about expected returns and risk change. We use empirical measures of portfolio rebalancing to back out investors' views, specifically their views about the state of the economy. We show that aggregate portfolio rebalancing across equity sectors...

We augment standard ln earnings equations with variables reflecting unmeasured attributes of workers and measured and unmeasured attributes of their employer. Using panel employee-establishment data for US manufacturing we find that the observable employer characteristics that most impact...

This paper explores how accounting for variations in factor utilization rates alters the empirical characteristics of productivity residuals in the United States and Canada. Using data on 19 manufacturing industries, we study the behavior of productivity using three proxies for capital services....

Job losses during the Great Recession were concentrated among middle-skill workers, the same group that over the long run has suffered the most from automation and international trade. How might long-run occupational polarization be related to cyclical changes in middle-skill employment? We find...

How sensitive are the earnings of top earners to business cycles? And, how does the business cycle sensitivity of top earners vary by industry? We use a confidential dataset on earnings histories of US males from the Social Security Administration. On average, individuals in the top 1% of the...

We investigate whether a market-clearing model of the labor market is consistent with the cyclical upgrading of labor: workers tend to move to higher paying industries in expansions and to lower paying industries in contractions. By applying Roy's (1951) model of self-selection to industry...

Business cycles reflect changes over time in the amount of trade between individuals. In this paper we show that incorporating explicitly intra-temporal gains from trade between individuals into a macroeconomic model can provide new insight into the potential mechanisms driving economic...

We construct a new dataset for the average employment size of establishments across sectors and countries from hundreds of sources. Establishments are larger in manufacturing than in services, and in each sector they are larger in richer countries. The cross-country income elasticity of...

The impact of trade liberalization on manufacturing growth has been widely studied in the literature. What has gone unappreciated is that accelerated manufacturing growth has also been accompanied by accelerated services growth. Using firm-level data from India, we find a positive spillover from...