We examine monthly variation in weekly work hours using data for 2003-10 from the Current Population Survey (CPS) on hours/worker, from the Current Employment Survey (CES) on hours/job, and from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) on both. The ATUS data minimize recall difficulties and constrain...

A longstanding puzzle of empirical economics is that average labor productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms. This paper provides a framework to assess the empirical importance of competing hypotheses for explaining the observed procyclicality. For each competing...

Employment and hours appear far more cyclical than dictated by the behavior of productivity and consumption. This puzzle has been called "the labor wedge" -- a cyclical intratemporal wedge between the marginal product of labor and the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure. The...

We argue that recoveries from demand-driven recessions with expenditure cuts concentrated in services or non-durables will tend to be weaker than recoveries from recessions more biased towards durables. Intuitively, the smaller the bias towards more durable goods, the less the recovery is...

This paper argues that a broad class of search models cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies in response to shocks of a plausible magnitude. In the U.S., the vacancy-unemployment ratio is 20 times as volatile as average labor...

Do recessions speed up or impede productivity-enhancing reallocation? To investigate this question, we use U.S. linked employer-employee data to examine how worker flows contribute to productivity growth over the business cycle. We find that in expansions high-productivity firms grow faster...

Hall has pointed out that, when there is perfect competition and price flexibility, labor hoarding alone will not induce the Solow residual measured using labor's share in revenues to be procyclical. We show that, even with perfect competition, a small amount of price rigidity - we assume firms...

It is widely hypothesized that incomes in wealthy countries are insulated from environmental conditions because individuals have the resources needed to adapt to their environment. We test this idea in the wealthiest economy in human history. Using within-county variation in weather, we estimate...

This study documents a strong inverse relationship between number of pages of labor contracts in effect and the productivity observed in a sample of ten unionized plants. It is argued that this relationship reflects the productivity-inhibiting effects of increases in the number and complexity of...