According to the growing “Google econometrics” literature, Google queries may help predict economic activity. The aim of our paper is to test whether these data can enhance predictions of youth unemployment in France.

We propose and estimate a model where unemployment fluctuations result from self-fulfilling changes in expected inflation (sunspot shocks) affecting nominal wage bargaining. Since the estimated parameters fall near the locus of Hopf bifurcations, country-specific expected inflation shocks can...

I compare unemployment expectations from the Michigan Survey of Consumers to VAR forecastable movements in unemployment. I document three key facts. First, one-half to one-third of the population expects unemployment to rise when it is falling at the end of a recession even though the VAR...

We propose and estimate a model where unemployment fluctuations result from self-fulfilling changes in expected inflation (sunspot shocks) affecting nominal wage bargaining. Since the estimated parameters fall near the locus of Hopf bifurcations, country-specific expected inflation shocks can...

I carry out a business cycle accounting exercise (Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan, 2007) on theU.S. data measured in wage units (Farmer (2010)) for the entire postwar period. In contrast toa conventional approach, this approach preserves common medium-term business cyclefluctuations in GDP, its...

The business cycle is alive and well, and real variables respond to it more or less as they always did. Witness the Great Recession. In ation, in contrast, has gone quiescent. This paper studies the sources of this disconnect using VARs and an estimated DSGE model. It finds that the disconnect...

This report analyzes the jobless recovery phenomenon observed in Mexico during the current and previous crisis. It analyzes the role of job creation and destruction in the economic cycle and researches different causes that might explain a jobless recovery. Some of these are structural change,...