We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. Our estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of...

We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. Our estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of...

Equilibrium labor market theory suggests that unemployment benefit extensions affect unemployment by impacting both job search decisions by the unemployed and job creation decisions by employers. The existing empirical literature focused on the former effect only. We develop a new methodology...

Can governmental policies mitigate the effects of recessions on unemployment? We study whether the Swiss short-time work (STW) program reduced unemployment in the 2009-2015 period using quarterly establishment-level panel data linking several administrative data sources. We compare changes in...

Although New Keynesian models with labor market frictions found an increase in unemployment and a decrease in labor market tightness in response to a positive technology shock (which appears to be in line with recent empirical findings), the volatilities of unemployment and labor market...

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it reviews the model of search and matching equilibrium and derives the properties of employment and unemployment equilibrium. Second, it applies the model to the study of employment fluctuations and to the explanation of differences in unemployment...

We study how the countercyclicality of temporary layoffs affects aggregate unemployment fluctuations, firm entry and exit dynamics, and macroeconomic fluctuations by building a tractable framework with equilibrium unemployment and endogenous firm entry and exit where firms have a choice over...

We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large part of the long-term earnings losses...

Ljungqvist and Sargent (2017) (LS) show that unemployment fluctuations can be understood in terms of a quantity they call the "fundamental surplus." However, their analysis ignores risk premia, a force that Hall (2017) shows is important in understanding unemployment fluctuations. We show how...

I propose a new mechanism for sluggish wages based on workers' noisy information about the state of the economy. Wages do not respond immediately to a positive aggregate shock because workers do not (yet) have enough information to demand higher wages. This increases firms' incentives to post...