Using 1979-2011 Current Population Survey data for the United States and 1975-2011 New Earnings Survey data for Great Britain, we study wage behavior in both countries, with particular attention to the Great Recession. Real wages are procyclical in both countries, but the procyclicality of real...

What can explain the large changes in aggregate demand that occur in the absence of any seemingly corresponding shock to the underlying state variables of the economy? We show that macroeconomic volatility can arise from dispersions of beliefs among agents. These dispersions give rise to bets...

This paper provides an explanation for situations in which the state variables describing the economy do not change, but aggregate consumption experiences significant changes. We present a theory of pseudo-wealth--individuals' perceived wealth that is derived from heterogeneous beliefs and...

The extraordinary events surrounding the Great Recession have cast a considerable doubt on the traditional sources of macroeconomic instability. In their place, economists have singled out financial and uncertainty shocks as potentially important drivers of economic fluctuations. Empirically...

The persistence of inflation during periods of high unemployment poses the central problem for macroeconomic policy in coming years. The extent of success in reducing both inflation and unemployment will depend strongly on the short-run responsiveness of wage inflation to unemployment and excess...

In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on whether...

In the most thorough study to date on wage cyclicality among job stayers, Devereux's (2001) analysis of men in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics produced two puzzling findings: (1) the real wages of salaried workers are noncyclical, and (2) wage cyclicality among hourly workers differs between...

This paper considers a model where individual workers bargain with firms over their wages and where their bargaining power is so strong that some workers are unemployed. The result is that an increase in the elasticity of demand facing individual firms raises employment (as in the case where the...

In the period since the 1960's, as in other periods, aggregate time series on real wages have displayed only modest cyclicality. Macroeconomists therefore have described weak cyclicality of real wages as a salient feature of the business cycle. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, our analysis...

This paper is an examination of cyclical real wage behavior in the United States since World War II. Like most previous aggregate studies. ours finds little cyclicalitv in aggregate industry real wage data. On the other hand, our analysis of longitudinal microdata from the Panel Study of Income...