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...

After rising to 10 percent in the wake of the Great Recession, the unemployment rate is now approaching a level that many observers--including the Congressional Budget Office, as shown in Figure 1--associate with the natural rate of unemployment

This paper finds that the permanent job losses associated with industrial restructuring have significantly boosted the variance of unemployment, causing it to rise much higher in recessions than it would have without cyclically correlated restructuring. Moreover, the influence of restructuring...

A number of industries underwent large and permanent reductions in employment growth at the beginning of this decade. We investigate the sources of these permanent changes in employment growth and what the consequences were for the U.S. economy. In particular, we find that relative declines in...

An important step in understanding why employment fluctuates cyclically is determining the relative importance of cyclical movements in permanent and temporary plant-level employment changes. If movements in permanent employment changes are important, then recessions are times when the...

Because plant deaths destroy specific capital with large local economic impacts and potentially important macroeconmic effects, understanding the causes of deaths and, in particular, why they are concentrated in cyclical downturns, is important. The reallocationtiming hypothesis posits that...

An important step in understanding why employment fluctuates cyclically is determining the relative importance of cyclical movements in permanent and temporary plant-level employment changes. If movements in permanent employment changes are important, then recessions are times when the...

The US labor market witnessed two apparently unrelated secular movements in the last 30 years: a decline in unemployment between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, and a decline in participation since the early 2000s. Using CPS micro data and a stock- flow accounting framework, we show that a...

The matching function -a key building block in models of labor market frictions- implies that the job finding rate depends only on labor market tightness. We estimate such a matching function and find that the relation, although remarkably stable over 1967-2007, broke down spectacularly after...