We provide new evidence that large firms or establishments are more sensitive than small ones to business cycle conditions. Larger employers shed proportionally more jobs in recessions and create more of their new jobs late in expansions, both in gross and net terms. We employ a variety of...

Who fares worse in an economic downturn, low- or high-paying firms? Different answers to this question imply very different consequences for the costs of recessions. Using U.S. employer-employee data, we find that employment growth at low-paying firms is less cyclically sensitive. High-paying...

Microeconomic flexibility, by facilitating the process of creative-destruction, is at the core of economic growth in modern market economies. The main reason for why this process is not infinitely fast, is the presence of adjustment costs, some of them technological, other institutional. Chief...

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...

The high pace of reallocation across producers is pervasive in the U.S. economy. Evidence shows this high pace of reallocation is closely linked to productivity. While these patterns hold on average, the extent to which the reallocation dynamics in recessions are "cleansing" is an open question....

One of the strongest trends in recent macroeconomic modeling of labor market fluctuations is to treat unemployment inflows as acyclical. This trend stems in large part from an influential paper by Shimer on "Reassessing the Ins and Outs of Unemployment," i.e., the extent to which increased...

We introduce worker differences in labor supply, reflecting differences in skills and assets, into a model of separations, matching, and unemployment over the business cycle. Separating from employment when unemployment duration is long is particularly costly for workers with high labor supply....

This paper introduces a notion of fir m size into a search and matching model with endogenous job destruction. The outcome is a rich, yet analytically tractable framework that can be used to analyze a broad set of features of both the cross section and the dynamics of the aggregate labor market....

Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) covering 1990-2011, we document that a surprisingly large number of workers return to their previous employer after a jobless spell and experience more favorable labor market outcomes than job switchers. Over 40% of all...

This paper uses data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine retirement and related labor market outcomes for the Early Boomer cohort, those in their mid-fifties at the onset of the Great Recession. Outcomes are then compared with older cohorts at the same age. The Great Recession...