Temporary Layoffs, Loss-of-Recall, and Cyclical Unemployment Dynamics

By Mark Gertler, Christopher Huckfeldt, and Antonella Trigari

American Economic Review, March 2026

We revisit the role of temporary layoffs in the business cycle. While some have emphasized a stabilizing effect due to recall hiring, we quantify from the data an important countercyclical destabilizing effect due to "loss-of-recall," whereby workers in t...

Disagreement about Monetary Policy

By Karthik A. Sastry

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

This paper studies why central banks and markets hold different beliefs. I introduce a model that formalizes three mechanisms for disagreement: asymmetric information about fundamentals, different perceptions of the policy rule, and different confidence i...

The Gender Pay Gap: Micro Sources and Macro Consequences

By Iacopo Morchio and Christian Moser

American Economic Review, May 2026

Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil, we document a significant gender pay gap, which is largely attributed to women working at lower-paying employers. To interpret this fact, we develop an equilibrium search model with endogenous firm pay, ame...

Modern Theory of Unemployment Fluctuations: Empirics and Policy Applications

By Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, May 2003

Strong and widely accepted evidence shows that the natural rate of unemployment varies over time with substantial amplitude. The frictions in the labor market that account for positive normal levels of unemployment are not simple and mechanical. Instead, ...

Wages and Employment in the United States and Germany: What Explains the Differences?

By Paul Beaudry and David A. Green

American Economic Review, June 2003

Over the last 20 years the wage-education relationships in the United States and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education compositions of employment have evolved in a parallel fashion. In this paper, we show how these patterns shed light...

Interpreting Aggregate Wage Growth: The Role of Labor Market Participation

By Richard Blundell, Howard Reed, and Thomas M. Stoker

American Economic Review, September 2003

A new and easily implementable framework for the empirical analysis of the relationship between aggregate and individual wages is developed. Aggregate real wages are shown to contain three important bias terms: one associated with the dispersion of indivi...

Wage Adjustment Under Low Inflation: Evidence from U.S. History

By Christopher Hanes and John A. James

American Economic Review, September 2003

Fundamentals, Panics, and Bank Distress During the Depression

By Charles W. Calomiris and Joseph R. Mason

American Economic Review, December 2003

We assemble bank-level and other data for Fed member banks to model determinants of bank failure. Fundamentals explain bank failure risk well. The first two Friedman-Schwartz crises are not associated with positive unexplained residual failure risk, or in...

Kin Groups and Reciprocity: A Model of Credit Transactions in Ghana

By Eliana La Ferrara

American Economic Review, December 2003

This paper studies kinship band networks as capital market institutions. Membership in a community where individuals are dynastically linked has two effects on informal credit. First, the nonanonymity of the dynastic link allows to sanction the defaulters...

Crime, Inequality, and Unemployment

By Kenneth Burdett, Ricardo Lagos, and Randall Wright

American Economic Review, December 2003

The Institutions of Monetary Policy

By Mervyn King

American Economic Review, May 2004

Exchange-Rate Policy and the Zero Bound on Nominal Interest Rates

By Günter Coenen and Volker W. Wieland

American Economic Review, May 2004

CEO Pay and Appointments: A Market-Based Explanation for Recent Trends

By Kevin J. Murphy and Ján Zábojník

American Economic Review, May 2004

Inequality and the Organization of Knowledge

By Luis Garicano and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, May 2004

Managed Care, Information, and Diffusion: The Case of Treatment for Heart-Attack Patients

By Laurence C. Baker, Christopher C. Afendulis, and Paul A. Heidenreich

American Economic Review, May 2004

Why Does the Cyclical Behavior of Real Wages Change Over Time?

By Kevin X.D. Huang, Zheng Liu, and Louis Phaneuf

American Economic Review, September 2004

The cyclical behavior of real wages has evolved from mildly countercyclical during the interwar period to modestly procyclical in the postwar era. This paper presents a general-equilibrium business-cycle model that helps explain the evolution. In the mode...

The Macroeconomics of Labor and Credit Market Imperfections

By Etienne Wasmer and Philippe Weil

American Economic Review, September 2004

Credit market imperfections influence the labor market and aggregate economic activity. In turn, macroeconomic factors have an impact on the credit sector. To assess these effects in a tractable general-equilibrium framework, we introduce endogenous searc...

A Comment on the Economics of Labor Adjustment: Mind the Gap

By Russell Cooper and Jonathan L. Willis

American Economic Review, September 2004

A Comment on the Economics of Labor Adjustment: Mind the Gap: Reply

By Ricardo J. Caballero and Eduardo M.R.A. Engel

American Economic Review, September 2004

A Comment on the Economics of Labor Adjustment: Mind the Gap: Rejoinder

By Russell Cooper and Jonathan L. Willis

American Economic Review, September 2004