We conduct an accounting exercise of the role of worker flows between unemployment, employment, and labor force … nonparticipation in the dynamics of the aggregate unemployment rate across four recent recessions: 1982-1983, 1990-1991, 2001, and 2007 … employment and unemployment to account for the dynamics of the unemployment rate, this was not true in the Great Recession. The …

wage data do not support the rigidity necessary to generate the empirical volatility of unemployment in the standard search …

Shimer (2012) accounts for the volatility of unemployment based on a model of homogeneous unemployment. Using data on … short-term unemployment he finds that most of unemployment volatility is accounted for by variations in the exit rate from … unemployment. The assumption of homogeneous exit rates is inconsistent with the observed negative duration dependence of …

While maximum unemployment rates following the most recent economic recession are low by historical standards, the lack … of increase in payroll employment leads many to conclude that official unemployment rates understate current labor market … level of the current unemployment rate may not directly comparable with earlier periods, additional labor market evidence …

where aggregate shocks have a permanent effect on the unemployment rate. If agents' wealth decreases, the unemployment rate … increases for a potentially indefinite period. This makes unemployment rate dynamics path dependent as in Blanchard and Summers … (1987). I argue that this feature explains the persistence of the unemployment rate in the U.S. after the Great Recession …