The Accuracy of Firms' Wage Inflation Expectations

By Lukas Buchheim, Sebastian Link, and Sascha Möhrle

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Much of recent survey-based macroeconomic research studies firms' aggregate price inflation expectations, but little is known about their expectations of own wage inflation. This paper examines the accuracy of wage inflation expectations using novel panel...

Labor Market Shocks and Immigration Enforcement

By Sergio Barrera, Brianna Felegi, and Sarina Heron

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We study the effects of labor market shocks on immigration enforcement by evaluating the impact of the Great Recession on the likelihood that commuting zones partner with immigration authorities through 287(g) agreements and early adoption of Secure Commu...

Regional Dissent: Do Local Economic Conditions Influence FOMC Votes?

By Anton Bobrov, Rupal Kamdar, and Mauricio Ulate

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

US monetary policy decisions are made by the 12 voting members of the FOMC, seven of which inherently represent national-level interests. The remaining members, a rotating group of presidents from the 12 Federal Reserve districts, come instead from subnat...

Skill Depreciation during Unemployment: Evidence from Panel Data

By Jonathan Cohen, Andrew C. Johnston, and Attila Lindner

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

We examine the depreciation of skills among unemployed German workers using a panel of skill measures linked to administrative data. Both the reemployment hazard and reemployment earnings steadily decline with unemployment duration. Indicators of depressi...

What Caused the US Pandemic-Era Inflation?

By Ben Bernanke and Olivier Blanchard

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2025

We estimate a simple dynamic model of prices, wages, and short-run and long-run inflation expectations that allows us to analyze and quantify the sources of recent US inflation. We find that, contrary to early concerns that inflation would be spurred by o...

Uncertainty Shocks, Adjustment Costs, and Firm Beliefs: Evidence from a Representative Survey

By Andreas Dibiasi, Heiner Mikosch, and Samad Sarferaz

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2025

This paper studies the dynamic effects of an uncertainty shock on firm expectations. We conduct a survey that confronts managers from a representative firm sample with a model-consistent uncertainty shock scenario. An exogenous increase in uncertainty sig...

Bones, Bombs, and Break Points: The Geography of Economic Activity

By Donald R. Davis and David E. Weinstein

American Economic Review, December 2002

We consider the distribution of economic activity within a country in light of three leading theories—increasing returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan from the Stone Ag...

Temporary Layoffs, Firm Entry and Exit Dynamics, and Aggregate Fluctuations

By Sanjay K. Chugh and Alan Finkelstein Shapiro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We build a model to study how the countercyclicality of temporary layoffs affects unemployment, firm entry and exit, and macroeconomic fluctuations. The model can quantitatively generate the rich cyclical dynamics of temporary layoffs, unemployment, and f...

The Impact of Unemployment Benefit Extensions on Employment: The 2014 Employment Miracle?

By Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii, and Kurt Mitman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We measure the aggregate effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment and the labor force. We exploit the variation induced by Congress's failure in December 2013 to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Rec...

Time to Say Goodbye: The Macroeconomic Implications of Termination Notice

By Tomer Ifergane

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

Insuring households against unemployment risk is a cornerstone of modern economic policy. Many countries provide unemployment insurance partly by employment protection mandates, most commonly using termination notice mandates. Unlike unemployment insuranc...

Changing Business Cycles: The Role of Women's Employment

By Stefania Albanesi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

Women's labor force participation in the United States rose rapidly until the mid-1990s when it flattened out. I examine the impact of this change in trend on aggregate business cycles with a quantitative model that incorporates gender differences. I show...

Monetary Policy and the Labor Market: A Quasi-experiment in Sweden

By John Coglianese, Maria Olsson, and Christina Patterson

American Economic Review, October 2025

We analyze a monetary quasi-experiment in Sweden from 2010–2011, when the Riksbank raised the interest rate substantially. We argue that this increase was beyond what labor market conditions warranted, driven instead by new concerns about financial stab...

Macroeconomic Priorities

By Robert E. Lucas Jr.

American Economic Review, March 2003

Stages of Diversification

By Jean Imbs and Romain Wacziarg

American Economic Review, March 2003

This paper studies the evolution of sectoral concentration in relation to the level of per capita income. We show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a U-shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources: countries first diversify, i...

Downward Rigidity in the Wage for New Hires

By Jonathon Hazell and Bledi Taska

American Economic Review, December 2025

Wage rigidity is an important explanation for unemployment fluctuations. In benchmark models wages for new hires are key, but there is limited evidence on this margin. We use wages posted on vacancies, with job and establishment information, to measure th...

From Deviations to Shortfalls: The Effects of the FOMC's New Employment Objective

By Brent Bundick and Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2026

We analyze the effects of a monetary policy that stabilizes "shortfalls" rather than "deviations" of employment from its maximum level. A shortfalls-stabilization rule leads to expectations of more accommodative policy in expansions, raising average infla...

Monetary Cooperation during Global Inflation Surges

By Luca Fornaro and Federica Romei

American Economic Review, January 2026

We study optimal monetary policy during times of global scarcity of tradable goods. The optimal monetary response entails a surge in inflation, which helps rebalance production toward the tradable sector. While the inflation costs are fully borne domestic...

Family Institutions and the Global Fertility Transition

[Symposium: Fertility Rates]

By Paula E. Gobbi, Anne Hannusch, and Pauline Rossi

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

Much of the observed cross-country variation in fertility aligns with the predictions of classic theories of the fertility transition: countries with higher levels of human capital, higher GDP per capita, or lower mortality rates tend to exhibit lower fer...

Labor Market Power: From Micro Evidence to Macro Consequences

[Symposium: Competition in Labor Markets]

By David Berger, Kyle Herkenhoff, and Simon Mongey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

The traditional theoretical and empirical "micro approach" to studying labor market power (or monopsony) requires that firms are small and atomistic. This is at odds with the reality of labor markets in which monopsony potentially matters most. Empiricall...

Disemployment Effects of Unemployment Insurance: A Meta-analysis

By Jonathan P. Cohen and Peter Ganong

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2026

We systematically review studies of how unemployment benefits affect unemployment duration. Statistically significant findings are eight times more likely to be published. Correcting for publication bias cuts the average elasticity by a third. Meta-analys...