We examine the diffusion of more than twenty technologies across twenty-three of the world ’s leading industrial economies. Our evidence covers major technology classes such as textile production, steel manufacture, communications, information technology, transportation, and electricity for...

In this paper we measure the extent to which countries are converging in per capita productivity levels. We formally define convergence in a time series analytical context, derive the necessary and sufficient conditions and introduce a cluster analytical procedure that enables us to distinguish...

The paper documents the shift in the Beveridge curve in the United States since the Great Recession. It argues that a decline in quits, the relatively poor performance of the construction sector, and the extension of unemployment insurance benefits have largely driven this shift. The paper then...

What inflation rate should central banks target? Following the work of Bils and Klenow (2004), who were the first to document the large amount of heterogeneity in the frequency of price changes across different categories of goods and services in the United States, a growing literature has...

We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow from unemployment using publicly available data for fourteen OECD economies. Using a novel decomposition that allows for deviations of unemployment from its flow steady state, we find that fluctuations in both inflow...

Using quarterly data for the U.K. from 1993 through 2012, we document that in economic downturns a smaller fraction of unemployed workers change their career when starting a new job. Moreover, the proportion of total hires that involves a career change for the worker also drops in recessions....

Every month, millions of workers search for new jobs although they already have one. About one-tenth of these searchers switch employers in the following month. However, most of the job switchers in the United States never reported having looked for a job. This implies that, rather than those...

Using quarterly data for the U.K. from 1993 through 2012, we document that in economic downturns a smaller fraction of unemployed workers, when starting a new job, start it in a new occupation or industry (a career change, in the parlance of this paper). Moreover, the proportion of total hires...

Since the end of the Great Recession in mid-2009, the unemployment rate has recovered slowly, falling by only one percentage point from its peak. We find that the lackluster labor market recovery can be traced in large part to weakness in aggregate demand; only a small part seems attributable to...