The behavior of unemploy. over the bus. cycle plays an important role in economic policy considerations. Most of the variation in unemploy. comes about through changes in job-finding rates. Search theories of unemploy. study the implications of the matching process between unemployed workers and vacant jobs in environments with search frictions. The authors review work on whether these theories are consistent with the cyclical behavior of unemploy. and job-finding rates. They conclude that when the basic search model is calibrated to generate labor market volatility of a magnitude comparable with the data, it has sharp counterfactual implications for the size and the cyclicality of the wage share and for the elasticity of unemploy. to welfare benefits.

Die Entwicklung von Arbeitslosigkeit und Beschäftigung wird maßgeblich von den Übergängen auf dem Arbeitsmarkt beeinflusst. Daniela Nordmeier analysiert die Übergänge von Arbeitskräften, also Einstellungen und Entlassungen, im konjunkturellen Kontext. Dabei stützt sie sich auf prozessgenerierte Personendaten des IAB, welche einen umfassenden Einblick in die Dynamik am deutschen Arbeitsmarkt ermöglichen. Die Arbeit umfasst drei eigenständige wissenschaftliche Aufsätze, die zentrale Aspekte dieser Thematik beleuchten: * Zeitaggregation bei der Messung von Arbeitsmarktübergängen * Dynamik der Arbeitslosigkeit in Abhängigkeit von strukturellen Schocks * Modellierung von Einstellungen mithilfe einer Matchingfunktion.

This paper applies recent advances in the study of labor market dynamics to a representative developing country with a large informal or unregulated sector, Mexico. It studies quarterly gross flows of workers over a 15-year period that includes two recoveries and recessions, including the celebrated 1995 Tequila crisis. It finds, first, that the formal or modern salaried sector shows the same procyclical job finding rate and mildly countercyclical separation behavior identified in the recent U.S. literature, and relative wage rigidity, both consistent with Shimer (2005a) and Hall (2005). The unregulated informal sector, however, shows reasonable acyclicality in the job finding rate coupled with sharp countercyclical movements in the job separation rate, consistent with standard small firm dynamics and Davis and Haltiwanger (1992 and 1999). This interaction of regulatory coverage and firm sizes, and patterns of gross worker flows thus sheds suggestive light on the roots of countercyclical job finding behavior in the U.S. literature. Second, the patterns of worker transitions between formality and informality correspond to the job-to-job dynamics observed in the United States and not to the traditional idea of informality constituting the inferior sector of a segmented market. That said, the countercyclical job finding in the formal sector combined with the acyclical job finding in informality does lead to the latter absorbing relatively more labor during downturns. Third, aggregate employment dynamics vary across the Tequila crisis and the later 2001 slowdown, suggesting that not only the composition of employment, but the nature of the shocks is important to understanding how the labor market adjusts.

This paper studies the Swedish fiscal consolidation episode of the 1990s through the lens of a small open economy model with distortionary taxation and unemployment. We argue that the simultaneous reduction in the fiscal deficit and unemployment rate in this episode stems from two factors: (i) high growth rates of total factor productivity (TFP), experienced after the implementation of structural reforms; and (ii) a sustained wage restraint that occurred during the 1990s. The model simulations show that economic growth, accounted for mostly by TFP gains, improved the fiscal balance by 8 percentage points of GDP through an expansion of the tax base and fiscal revenues. Moreover, the combination of stable wages and higher TFP boosted net exports and led to a reduction in the unemployment rate. A counterfactual simulation assuming stagnant TFP shows that fiscal consolidation measures alone would have generated a double-digit unemployment rate without eliminating the fiscal deficit.

The new edition of a comprehensive treatment of monetary economics, including the first extensive coverage of the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates. This textbook presents a comprehensive treatment of the most important topics in monetary economics, focusing on the primary models monetary economists have employed to address topics in theory and policy. Striking a balance of insight, accessibility, and rigor, the book covers the basic theoretical approaches, shows how to do simulation work with the models, and discusses the full range of frictions that economists have studied to understand the impacts of monetary policy. For the fourth edition, every chapter has been revised to improve the exposition and to reflect recent research. The new edition offers an entirely new chapter on the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates, forward guidance policies, and quantitative and credit easing policies. Material on the basic new Keynesian model has been reorganized into a single chapter to provide a comprehensive analysis of the model and its policy implications. In addition, the chapter on the open economy now reflects the dominance of the new Keynesian approach. Other new material includes discussions of price adjustment, labor market frictions and unemployment, and moral hazard frictions among financial intermediaries. References and end-of-chapter problems allow readers to extend their knowledge of the topics covered. Monetary Theory and Policy continues to be the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of monetary economics, not only the leading text in the field but also the standard reference for academics and central bank researchers.

Authoritative takes on the most current and pressing issues in macroeconomics today. The NBER Macroeconomics Annual provides a forum for leading economists to participate in important debates in macroeconomics and to report on major developments in macroeconomic analysis and policy. The NBER Macroeconomics Annual brings together leading scholars to discuss five research papers on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics. First, Andrea Eisfeldt, Antonio Falato, and Mindy Xiaolan document the rise of a new class of worker that receives part of its labor income as equity-based compensation, its role in the recent decline in the labor share of income, and implications for the returns to skilled labor and the implied capital-skill complementarity. Next, Michael Bauer and Eric Swanson focus on monetary policy shocks and argue the correlation between estimated monetary surprises and previously available information can be explained by uncertainty about the parameters of the monetary policy rule. Using new data and methods they find effects of monetary policy on macroeconomic variables that are much larger than previously estimated. Job Boerma and Loukas Karabarbounis provide a framework for quantitatively exploring the gap in wealth between White and Black Americans over the past 150 years and examine the effectiveness of reparations as a tool for closing this gap. Guido Menzio considers workers who do not have rational expectations, and whose “stubborn” beliefs change the response of wages to technology shocks, resulting in sticky wages. He finds that the larger the fraction of workers with stubborn beliefs, the more volatile unemployment is. Finally, Rishabh Aggarwal, Adrien Auclert, Matthew Rognlie, and Ludwig Straub investigate the growth—particularly in the United States—of private savings, current account deficits, and fiscal deficits after 2020. They argue that fiscal deficits lead to large and persistent increases in private savings and current account deficits.

Our answer: Not so well. We reached that conclusion after reviewing recent research on the role of technology as a source of economic fluctuations. The bulk of the evidence suggests a limited role for aggregate technology shocks, pointing instead to demand factors as the main force behind the strong positive comovement between output and labor input measures.