Employment and hours appear far more cyclical than dictated by the behavior of productivity and consumption. This puzzle has been called "the labor wedge" -- a cyclical intratemporal wedge between the marginal product of labor and the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure. The...

According to the textbook Keynesian model, short-run demand for labor is sensitive to the demand for goods. In this view, sellers deviate from setting the marginal product of labor proportional to the real wage, instead enduring or choosing lower price markups when demand for goods is high. We...

The last decade has seen a burst of micro price studies. Many studies analyze data underlying national CPIs and PPIs. Others focus on more granular subnational grocery store data. We review these studies with an eye toward the role of price setting in business cycles. We summarize with ten...