The U.S. employment rate fluctuates asymmetrically over the business cycle: it contracts deeply and sharply during recessions, but it recovers slowly and gradually during expansions. By contrast, output features nearly symmetric fluctuations. I explain these facts using a search-and-matching model with worker heterogeneity in skills. The model identifies endogenous job separation and cyclical fluctuations in the composition of the unemployment pool as key driving forces of the asymmetric cyclical behavior of the U.S. labor market and output.

Traditionally, economic growth and business cycles have been treated independently. However, the dependence of GDP levels on its history of shocks, what economists refer to as “hysteresis,” argues for unifying the analysis of growth and cycles. In this paper, we review the recent empirical and theoretical literature that motivate this paradigm shift. The renewed interest in hysteresis has been sparked by the persistence of the Global Financial Crisis and fears of a slow recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. The findings of the recent literature have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. In recessions, monetary and fiscal policies need to be more active to avoid the permanent scars of a downturn. And in good times, running a high-pressure economy could have permanent positive effects.

This paper shows that a search and matching model with idiosyncratic training cost shocks can explain the asymmetric movement of the job-finding rate over the business cycle and the decline of matching efficiency in recessions. Large negative aggregate shocks move the hiring cutoff into a part of the training cost distribution with higher density. The position of the hiring cutoff in the distribution is disciplined by the empirical elasticity of the job-finding rate with respect to market tightness. Our model explains a large fraction of the matching efficiency decline during the Great Recession and generates state-dependent effects of policy interventions.

Business cycle fluctuations in the U.S. employment-to-population ratio are asymmetric: deviations below trend (troughs) are larger than deviations above trend (peaks). This asymmetry has a "scarring effect," which reduces the average level of the employment-to-population ratio around which the economy fluctuates. To quantify such a scar, we formulate an equilibrium business cycle model featuring frictional unemployment and a labor force participation choice that produces the observed labor market asymmetry in the face of symmetric business cycle shocks. We quantify that the employment-to-population ratio would be 0.3 percentage points higher in the absence of cyclical fluctuations. Further, by dampening business cycles, counter-cyclical stabilization policy reduces the job loss by 70%.

This paper asks how well Okun’s Law fits short-run unemployment movements in the United States since 1948 and in twenty advanced economies since 1980. We find that Okun’s Law isa strong and stable relationship in most countries, one that did not change substantiallyduring the Great Recession. Accounts of breakdowns in the Law, such as the emergence of“jobless recoveries,” are flawed. We also find that the coefficient in the relationship—the effect of a one percent change in output on the unemployment rate—varies substantially across countries. This variation is partly explained by idiosyncratic features of national labormarkets, but it is not related to differences in employment protection legislation.