Contrary to popular belief, layoff announcements do not always lead to reduced employment. Using hand-collected data on layoff announcements for S&P 500 firms, I show that 32% of layoffs announced do not lead to employment downsizing. While the market, in the short run, does not react...

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...

Job search decisions of unemployed workers are forward-looking and respond to expected returns from the search process. When expected returns (or discount rates) are high, the discounted benefits from the search process are low. Thus unemployed workers search less intensively for jobs. We build...

Our simple model features agents heterogeneous in skill and risk aversion, incomplete financial markets, and redistributive taxation. In equilibrium, agents become entrepreneurs if their skill is sufficiently high or risk aversion sufficiently low. Under heavier taxation, entrepreneurs are more...

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in continuous time. My generalized framework accommodates jumps and heterogeneous recursive preferences. I show that countercyclical cross-sectional risk is irrelevant to risk premia if and only if all...

We investigate the impact of mass layoff announcements on the equity value of industry rivals. When a layoff announcement conveys good (bad) news for the announcer, rivals on average witness a 0.44 percent increase (0.60 percent decrease) in cumulative abnormal stock returns. This effect is...

We investigate the impact of mass layoff announcements on the equity value of industry rivals. When a layoff announcement conveys good (bad) news for the announcer, rivals on average witness a 0.44 percent increase (0.60 percent decrease) in cumulative abnormal stock returns. This effect is...