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...

A modification of existing sticky-wage models to account for the observed cyclical behavior of real wages by means of a model that introduces productivity factors into nominal-wage contracts.

Does the magnitude of a trough in employment differ from the magnitude of a peak in employment, and is the time employment spends in rising from a trough to a peak longer than the time spends in falling from a peak to a trough? In this paper we measure the “asymmetry of magnitudes” and the...

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.

Employment growth is highly correlated across regions. The author uses joint movements in regional employment growth to define and estimate a common factor, analogues to the business cycle. Regions differ substantially in the relative importance of cyclical shocks and idiosyncratic shocks in...

Over the last 35 years, the U.S. economy has created service sector jobs at a faster pace than manufacturing sector jobs. Not only has this trend led to a significant shift in the composition of the labor force from manufacturing to services, but it has also fundamentally changed the...