This paper presents a framework to interpret movements in the Beveridge curve and analyze unemployment fluctuations. We decompose the unemployment rate into three main components: (1) a component driven by changes in labor demand – movements along the Beveridge curve and shifts in the...

This paper argues that a key aspect of the US labor market is the presence of time-varying heterogeneity across nonparticipants. We document a decline in the share of nonparticipants who report wanting to work, and we argue that that decline, which was particularly strong in the second half of...

The U.S. labor market witnessed two apparently unrelated secular movements in the last 30 years: a decline in unemployment between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and a decline in participation since the early 2000s. Using CPS micro data and a stock-flow accounting framework, we show that a...

This paper argues that a key aspect of the US labor market is the presence of time-varying heterogeneity across nonparticipants. We document a decline in the share of nonparticipants who report wanting to work, and we argue that that decline, which was particularly strong in the second half of...

How much of aggregate employment fluctuations is due to plants destroying and then recreating the same jobs over the cycle and how much is due to some plants permanently destroying jobs in a recession and other plants permanently creating jobs in an expansion? This paper decomposes plant level...

Using a band pass filter, this paper estimates plant-level job flows at different frequencies and examines the characteristics of the high frequency (transitory) and low frequency (permanent) component flows. Because high frequency employment movements, which likely result in changes in the...