The U.S. economy entered the 1920s with a robust job market and high inflation but fell into a recession following the Federal Reserve's discount rate hikes to tame inflation. Using a newly constructed data set, we study labor market dynamics during this period. We find that labor markets were...

How much of aggregate employment fluctuations is due to plants destroying and then recreating the same jobs over the cycle and how much is due to some plants permanently destroying jobs in a recession and other plants permanently creating jobs in an expansion? This paper decomposes plant level...

Using a band pass filter, this paper estimates plant-level job flows at different frequencies and examines the characteristics of the high frequency (transitory) and low frequency (permanent) component flows. Because high frequency employment movements, which likely result in changes in the...

This paper measures the job-search responses to the COVID-19 pandemic using realtime data on vacancy postings and job ad views on Sweden’s largest online job board. First, new vacancy postings drop by 40%, similar to the US. Second, job seekers respond by searching less intensively, to the...

Market economies experience high rates of job creation and job destruction in almost every time period and sector. Each year, many businesses expand and many others contract. New businesses constantly enter, while others abruptly exit or gradually disappear. Amidst the turbulence of business...

The Canadian labour market experienced a period of unprecedented turmoil following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze the main changes using standard labour force statistics and new data on job postings. Envisaging a phase of temporary severing of employment relationships followed by...

We propose a model to evaluate the U.K.'s zero-hours contract (ZHC) a contract that exempts employers from the requirement to provide any minimum working hours, and allows employees to decline any workload. We find quantitatively that ZHCs improve welfare by enabling firms with more volatile...

This paper studies whether labor market mismatch played an important role for labor market dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply the framework of S¸ahin et al. (2014) to the US and the UK to measure misallocation between job seekers and vacancies across sectors until the third quarter...

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the UK labour market has been extremely heterogeneous across occupation and industrial sectors. Using novel data on job search, we document how individuals adjust their job search behaviour in response to changing employment patterns across occupations and...

The behaviors of labor markets between the end of World War I and the recession of 1920-1921 can provide important lessons for the economic conditions today. The U.S. economy entered the 1920s with a robust job market and high inflation but fell into a recession following the Federal Reserve’s...