This note combines unemployment and job vacancy data to build a new Sahm-type recession rule. The rule shows that the US economy may have entered a recession as early as April 2024. In August 2024, the probability that the US economy is in a recession is 48%.
This course presents a matching model of unemployment. It uses the model to study unemployment fluctuations; job rationing; efficient unemployment and unemployment gap; and labor market policies such as minimum wage, public employment, and unemployment insurance.
This paper argues that in the United States the full-employment rate of unemployment (FERU) is the geometric average of the unemployment and vacancy rates. Between 1930 and 2023, the FERU averages 4.1% and is very stable.
This paper explains why a wave of immigration reduces the employment rate of native workers, and why this reduction is larger in bad times. Yet, immigration improves native welfare when the labor market is inefficiently tight, because it helps firms to recruit.
This undergraduate course introduces macroeconomic concepts—such as GDP and inflation—and covers the IS-LM model of business cycles, matching model of unemployment, Phillips curve, Malthusian model of growth, and Solowian model of growth.
This paper develops a model of unemployment fluctuations. The innovation is to represent the labor and product markets with a matching structure. The model simultaneously features Keynesian unemployment, classical unemployment, and frictional unemployment.
This paper develops a New Keynesian model in which the government multiplier doubles when the unemployment rate rises from 5% to 8%. The multiplier is so countercyclical because in bad times, on the labor market, job rationing dwarfs matching frictions.
This paper proposes a matching model of the labor market with job rationing: unemployment does not disappear in the absence of matching frictions. In recessions, job rationing drives the rise of unemployment, whereas matching frictions contribute little to it.