Search Results
Working Paper
Entry and Exit, Unemployment, and Macroeconomic Tail Risk
This paper builds a nonlinear business cycle model with endogenous firm entry and exit and equilibrium unemployment. The entry and exit mechanism generates asymmetry and amplifies the transmission of productivity shocks, exposing the economy to significant tail risk. When calibrating the rates of entry and exit to match their shares of job creation and destruction, our quantitative model generates higher-order moments consistent with U.S. data. Firm exit particularly amplifies the severity and persistence of deep recessions such as the COVID-19 crisis. In the absence of entry and exit, the ...
Working Paper
The Matching Function and Nonlinear Business Cycles
The Cobb-Douglas matching function is ubiquitous in search and matching models, even though it imposes a constant matching elasticity that is unlikely to hold empirically. Using a general constant returns to scale matching function, this paper first derives analytical conditions that determine how the cyclicality of the matching elasticity amplifies or dampens the nonlinear dynamics of the job finding and unemployment rates. It then demonstrates that these effects are quantitatively significant and driven by plausible variation in the matching elasticity.
Working Paper
Countercyclical Fluctuations in Uncertainty are Endogenous
This paper uses a battery of calibrated and estimated structural models to determine the causal drivers of the negative correlation between output and aggregate uncertainty. We find the transmission of uncertainty shocks to output is weak, while aggregate uncertainty endogenously responds to first moment shocks in the presence of labor market search frictions. This indicates that countercyclical movements in aggregate uncertainty are endogenous responses to changes in output, rather than exogenous impulses. A vector autoregression on simulated data shows recursive identification techniques do ...
Working Paper
Entry and Exit, Unemployment, and the Business Cycle
Establishment entry and exit is strongly correlated with output and unemployment. This paper examines how these linkages affect business cycle dynamics through the lens of a search and matching model augmented to include multi-worker establishments that endogenously enter and exit. Analytical results show cyclical entry and exit cause reallocation of inputs that amplifies and skews business cycle dynamics. When the model is calibrated to the data, it generates realistic asymmetry in output and unemployment, data-consistent counter-cyclical endogenous uncertainty and a 55% higher welfare cost ...