We examine the impact of real oil price shocks on labor market flows in the U.S. We first use smooth transition regression (STR) models to investigate to what extent oil prices can be considered as a driving force of labor market fluctuations. Then we develop and calibrate a modified version of...

Unemployment swings have distributional consequences if some groups are hit harder than others. We examine if the sensitivity to local unemployment rates varies by characteristics such as health, cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability. Data on these variables come from registers covering...

Unemployment swings have distributional consequences if some groups are hit harder than others. We examine if the sensitivity to local unemployment rates varies by characteristics such as health, cognitive ability and non-cognitive ability. Data on these variables come from registers covering...

Theoretical models of downward real wage rigidity generate asymmetric wage cyclicality with real wages being rigid in "bad" times but upwardly flexible during "good". In this paper we use an administrative panel dataset from Germany to establish that such asymmetries are very salient in Germany....

This study presents a time series analysis of the cyclical relationship between the labour force participation rate and the unemployment rate in Australia over the period 1979-1998. The Hodrick-Prescott filter is employed to extract the cyclical components of the series, which are used for the...

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...