Estimates of labor market slack can diverge a great deal depending on how slack is defined. We calculate slack using five different concepts that all focus on a single labor market indicator, the unemployment rate. We show that the estimates all provide useful—but different—information. We...

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has tied its asset purchases to a “substantial improvement” in labor market conditions. While we don’t speculate on what the FOMC means by substantial improvement, we do explore the level of monthly job gains that would gradually deliver the...

Okun’s law is a statistical relationship between unemployment and GDP that is widely used as a rule of thumb for assessing the unemployment rate—why it might be at a certain level or where it might be headed, for example. Unfortunately, the Okun’s law relationship is not stable over time,...

This paper evaluates the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that incorporate unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches–the more reduced-form approach of Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) and the...

This paper assesses whether labor market frictions, in the form of searching and matching, can help explain movements in the labor wedge—the gap between the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) and the marginal productivity of labor in a perfectly competitive business cycle model. Results...

This paper assesses whether labor market frictions, in the form of searching and matching, can help explain movements in the labor wedge--the gap between the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) and the marginal productivity of labor in a perfectly competitive business cycle model. Results...

This paper shows that labor market search frictions do not explain fluctuations in the labor wedge per se. However, the introduction of extensive and intensive margin clarifies that measuring the MRS in terms of total hours artificially introduces procyclicality in the MRS. When the MRS is...

Countries with very flexible institutions and labor market policies, like the U.S., experienced substantial increases in unemployment over the course of the Great Recession, while countries with relatively rigid institutions and strict labor market policies, like France, fared better. However,...

The past recession has hit the labor market especially hard, and economists are wondering whether some fundamentals of the market have changed because of that blow. Many are suggesting that the natural rate of long-term unemployment—the level of unemployment an economy can’t go below—has...

In this paper, we present a simple, reduced form model of comovements in real activity and unemployment flows and use it to uncover the trend changes in these flows, which determine the trend in the unemployment rate. We argue that this trend rate has several key features that are reminiscent of...