The authors describe how evidence on aggregate job flows challenges standard business cycle theory and discuss recent developments in business cycle theory aimed at accounting for the evidence.

This paper estimates a structural model of firm growth and partially sunk investment. In the model, the firm's optimal adjustment keeps the gap between the actual capital stock and its frictionless counterpart between two boundaries. We show that any two quantiles of output growth conditional on...

We provide a simple explanation for the observation that the variance of job destruction is greater than the variance of job creation: job creation is costlier at the margin than job destruction. As Caballero [2] has argued, asymmetric employment adjustment costs at the establishment level need...

We provide a simple explanation for the observation that the variance of job destruction is greater than the variance of job creation. In our model profit maximization in the presence of proportional plant-level costs of job creation and destruction implies that shrinking plants are more...

There are significant differences in the dynamics of employment over the business cycle between young and old manufacturing plants. Young plants are more sensitive to aggregate disturbances, and they respond to them along different margins. We interpret these differences as reflecting greater...

This paper studies how producers’ idiosyncratic risks affect an industry’s aggregate dynamics in an environment where certainty equivalence fails. In the model, producers can place workers in two types of jobs, organized and temporary. Workers are less productive in temporary jobs, but...

We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and use it to estimate the effect of local agglomeration on per capita consumption growth. Agglomeration affects growth through the density of economic activity: higher production per unit of land raises local productivity. Firms take...

Evidence on the cost of business equipment investment supports a new way of understanding growth and business cycles. The equipment price has been falling for most of the last 40 years and it tends to fall more the faster economy is growing. This suggests that technological change embodied in...

This article discusses the empirical performance of a widely used model of nominal rigidities: the Calvo model of sticky good prices. The authors argue that there is overwhelming evidence against this model. But this evidence is generated under three key assumptions: one, there is no lag between...