Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses and few gains in operating performance. To evaluate these claims, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. buyouts from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and...

U.S. labor markets became much less fluid in recent decades. Job reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 1990, and worker reallocation rates fell more than a quarter after 2000. The declines cut across states, industries and demographic groups defined by age, gender and education....

We use administrative data linking workers and firms to study employer-to-employer flows. After discussing how to identify such flows in quarterly data, we investigate their basic empirical patterns. We find that the pace of employer-to-employer flows is high, representing about 4 percent of...

A longstanding puzzle of empirical economics is that average labor productivity declines during recessions and increases during booms. This paper provides a framework to assess the empirical importance of competing hypotheses for explaining the observed procyclicality. For each competing...

Openness to international competition can lead to enhanced resource allocation in the long-run. While factor reallocation is essential if net benefits are to be derived from trade liberalization, the process generates costs both for transitioning workers and for employers undergoing personnel...

This paper investigates the automobile industry code negotiated in 1933 and modified in 1935 under the National Industrial Recovery Act. The amended code contained a provision calling for automobile producers to alter the timing of new model introductions and the annual automobile show as a...