Is healthcare employment recession proof? We examine the hypothesis that healthcare employment is stable across the business cycle. We explicitly distinguish between negative aggregate demand and supply shocks in studying how healthcare employment responds to recessions, and show that this...

Conventional wisdom often holds that the healthcare sector fares better than other sectors during economic downturns. However, little research has examined the relationship between local economic conditions and healthcare employment. Understanding how the healthcare sector responds to economic...

We document two facts. First, during the Great Recession, consumers traded down in the quality of the goods and services they consumed. Second, the production of low-quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high-quality goods. When households traded down, labor demand fell, increasing...

Systemic risk builds up during booms in an economy featuring asymmetric information in asset markets, where investors' hidden effort choices endogenously determine asset quality distribution. Higher asset prices during booms induce more investors to sell their assets, which lowers their...