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...

What is the role of formal labor market institutions in the impact of crises on wages and employment? We study wage adjustment during the recent crisis in Italy's regulated labor market using the unregulated informal labor market as a counterfactual. We use a unique dataset on immigrant workers...

Has heightened uncertainty been a major contributor to the Great Recession and the slow recovery in the U.S.? To answer this question, we identify exogenous changes in six uncertainty proxies and quantify their contributions to GDP growth and the unemployment rate. Our results are threefold....