Unemployment in the U.S. has risen dramatically since the start of the recession in December 2007, going from about 6.8 million people in May 2007 to over 14.6 million in June 2010. This is often spoken of as "losing 7.8 million jobs," but this is a terribly misleading view of the issue. The...

Using newly digitized unemployment insurance claims data we construct a historical monthly unemployment series for U.S. states going back to January 1947. The constructed series are highly correlated with the Bureau of Labor Statics' state-level unemployment data, which are only available from...

A number of authors have recently emphasized that the conventional model of unemployment dynamics due to Mortensen and Pissarides has difficulty accounting for the relatively volatile behavior of labor market activity over the business cycle. We address this issue by modifying the MP framework...

The aggregate average unemployment rate in a given country is essentially the result of individual workers' transitions between the three core labor force states, employment, unemployment, and inactivity. The dynamics of these transitions depend both, on individual duration in a particular state...

In the present paper we examine how the introduction of endogenous participation in an otherwise standard DSGE model with matching frictions and nominal rigidities affects business cycle dynamics and monetary policy. The contribution of the paper is threefold: first, we show that the model...

We incorporate a participation decision in a standard New Keynesian model with matching frictions and show that treating the labor force as constant leads to incorrect evaluation of alternative policies. We also show that the presence of a participation margin mitigates the Shimer critique.

The aggregate average unemployment rate in a given country is essentially the result of individual workers' transitions between the three core labor force states, employment, unemployment, and inactivity. The dynamics of these transitions depend both, on individual duration in a particular state...

How much did shocks to household credit supply reduce employment in the Great Recession? To answer this question, I provide a general foundation for shift-share credit supply shocks, which shows that they are useful for accounting, but direct estimates may be biased. Combining the shift-share...

Within the existing literature on jobless recoveries a bit of a puzzle is emerging. On the one hand there is evidence of dynamic structural change including off-shoring/globalization and skill-biased technological advances. Other studies emphasize a less dynamic economy with slower growth,...

Uncertainty shocks are found to adversely affect labor market outcomes. Most studies attribute labor adjustments costs for the propagation of macroeconomic uncertainty to the labor market. Given that large establishments in Germany face higher labor adjustments cost, they should be affected more...