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There has been increasing interest in recent years in monopsony in the labour market. This paper discusses how we can measure monopsony power by combining insights from models based on both frictions and idiosyncrasies. It presents some evidence from the United Kingdom and the United States about how monopsony power varies across the wage distribution within markets, over the business cycle and over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty is a global problem, and fighting it is a historical task faced by humanity. The outbreak of poverty crises has a certain cyclicality, and the development of economic research may react to poverty cycles. To validate this view, we take the United States as an empirical example and establish a quantitative research architecture based on the bibliometrics and econometrics. In the first place, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of selected search terms relevant to poverty cycles. After that, the time-series data in the actual economy are collected for reflecting the trends and fluctuations in economic activity affected by poverty cycles. Meanwhile, with both bibliometric and economic data, a detrending measure via the band-pass (BP) filter is performed to estimate cycles. Finally, the Granger causality tests are implemented to explore the interaction between poverty cycles and economic research directly. As a supplement, this paper also provides a quantitative evaluation analysis, namely impulse-response functions, to investigate the influence of economic variables on bibliometric ones. The final results show there indeed exists an impact of poverty cycles in economic activity on relevant discussions in the scientific literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions surrounding the labour wedge and the tax wedge in the United States are complicated by the fact that, historically, there is a lack of coherent relationship between the series of hours worked (based on standard measurements) and that of the tax wedge. This has been cited as grounds for discounting the tax wedge as a viable explanation for the behaviour of the labour wedge. In this paper, I explore an alternative measurement of labour hours in the United States in a bid to clear up some of the morass surrounding the tax wedge and hours worked. In the process, I show that, the labour wedge is rather more aligned with available labour hours over the business cycle than it does actual hours worked. Moreover, cyclical properties of the available hours series, however puzzling, are explained by the presence of a government transfer scheme which I introduce in the household side of the market. Also, the presence of the transfer scheme alters the marginal rate of substitution (MRS) between consumption and leisure, and by doing so, reverses the cyclical properties of the tax wedge. This puts the tax wedge in alignment with the labour wedge over the business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the empirical relationship between firm‐borrowing channels and aggregate fluctuations for the 100 largest US firms over 2000–2018. The motivation for this study originates from the general consensus in macroeconomics that microeconomic shocks to firms cannot generate significant aggregate fluctuations. The analysis extends Gabaix's 2011 baseline model by incorporating measures for "bank shocks" at the firm‐level. In addition to supporting the granular hypothesis, the econometric results indicate that bank shocks have a weak impact on GDP fluctuations, whereas non‐bank loans exert a strong impact on the same. The above findings survive certain robustness checks associated with the presence of oil and monetary shocks, as well as with the firms' location factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, income and expenditure-side estimates of gross domestic product (GDP) (GDP I and GDP E ) measure "true" GDP with error and are available at a quarterly frequency. Methods exist for using these proxies to produce reconciled quarterly estimates of true GDP. In this paper, we extend these methods to provide reconciled historical true GDP estimates at a monthly frequency. We do this using a Bayesian mixed frequency vector autoregression (MF-VAR) involving GDP E , GDP I , unobserved true GDP, and monthly indicators of short-term economic activity. Our MF-VAR imposes restrictions that reflect a measurement-error perspective (i.e., the two GDP proxies are assumed to equal true GDP plus measurement error). Without further restrictions, our model is unidentified. We consider a range of restrictions that allow for point and set identification of true GDP and show that they lead to informative monthly GDP estimates. We illustrate how these new monthly data contribute to our historical understanding of business cycles and we provide a real-time application nowcasting monthly GDP over the pandemic recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some macroeconomic dimensions like the economic business cycle, the exchange rate movements when the degree of country openness is significant, or the level of inflation are often considered to explain measured-inflation dynamics. However, inflation volatility may also be affected by statistical agencies methodological changes. This paper explores both potential explanations in a panel data for 100 United States CPI-U subcategories. Using both unconditional and conditional variances, we find that crucial changes in how agencies consider quality adjustment in products, together with the macroeconomic variables help to understand CPI volatility over time, both in the short-run and in the long-run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how different uncertainty measures affect the unemployment level, inflow, and outflow in the U.S. across all states of the business cycle. We employ linear and nonlinear causality-in-quantile tests to capture a complete picture of the effect of uncertainty on U.S. unemployment. To verify whether there are any common effects across different uncertainty measures, we use monthly data on four uncertainty measures and on U.S. unemployment from January 1997 to August 2018. Our results corroborate the general predictions from a search and matching framework of how uncertainty affects unemployment and its flows. Fluctuations in uncertainty generate increases (upper-quantile changes) in the unemployment level and in the inflow. Conversely, shocks to uncertainty have a negative impact on U.S. unemployment outflow. Therefore, the effect of uncertainty is asymmetric depending on the states (quantiles) of U.S. unemployment and on the adopted unemployment measure. Our findings suggest state-contingent policies to stabilize the unemployment level when large uncertainty shocks occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Investigación Económica is the property of Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Facultad de Economia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reconsiders the differences between the sexes in the depths, lengths, timing, and employment effects of recessions in the United States. I find that, prior to the mid-1980s, female employment was in recession less frequently than male employment, but that the opposite has been true since then. Also, monthly employment growth forgone because of recession was roughly the same for women and men prior to the mid 1980s, but was substantially greater for men afterwards. Accounting for the sex-specific timing of recessions, as well as for forgone employment growth, (1) the negative effects of recessions on both female and male employment are much larger than is usually found, (2) male employment is hit relatively harder by recessions, and (3) the difference between the sexes in the employment effects of recession is much smaller than the previous literature indicates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We apply the Business Cycle Accounting framework to the COVID-19 recession in the Euro Area and the United States of America. We conclude that the efficiency wedge had the most important role in the Euro Area, followed by the labor and investment wedges. In the United States, the labor wedge was most crucial, with the investment wedge coming in second. We present hypotheses, supported by our theoretical framework, for the dichotomy of the role of the efficiency wedge between the studied regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Management & Business Economics is the property of Emerald Publishing Limited and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

To assess the conditional stability properties of the Kaleckian growth framework in the medium‐run, I investigate behavioral corridors where investment will be unresponsive to departures of actual from desired utilization rates—thus providing for the episodic incidence of Harrodian instability. I empirically assess this relationship using two‐state Markov‐Switching Structural Vector Auto‐Regression fit on non‐residential fixed investment and the rate of capacity utilization for the United States. To directly assess the relevance of a behavioral corridor for the cyclical dynamics of the endogenous variables, the probabilities governing the transition between hidden states are modelled as a time‐varying function of gap between realized utilization rates and their long‐run average. Results suggest the response of investment to structural utilization shocks is highly regime‐dependent and predominantly occurs during business cycle downturns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess the relative importance of fiscal and monetary policy shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in the United States. Using a Bayesian structural vector autoregressive model, we identify fiscal and monetary policy shocks based on a penalty function approach. We find that monetary policy shocks are relatively more important than fiscal policy shocks in explaining key macroeconomic variations and especially inflation variations. Our results provide evidence in support of a monetarist explanation of US business cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments around the world accumulate fiscal reserves to prepare for exogenous shocks such as recessions. Using data from 2004 to 2016 for state governments in the United States, we estimate empirical models controlling for time-variant and -invariant state characteristics. Our results show that savings increase at the expense of spending in specific categories and that fiscal reserves also support only certain expenditure functions. Further, we find that the relationship between savings and spending differs over the business cycle as fiscal reserves increase during times of economic prosperity and decrease during economic declines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the nonlinear propagation mechanism of tax policy in a heterogeneous‐agent equilibrium business cycle model with search frictions in the labor market and an extensive margin of employment adjustment. The model exhibits endogenous job destruction and endogenous hiring standards in the form of occasionally‐binding zero‐surplus constraints. After parameterizing the model using U.S. data, we find that the dynamic response of employment to a temporary change in the labor income tax is highly nonlinear, displaying sizable asymmetries and state dependence. Notably, the response to a tax rate cut is at least twice as large in a recession as in an expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the start date of the Great Recession across OECD countries. The Sahm Rule identifies the start of recession in the US to the beginning of 2008 but in most other OECD countries it identifies the start after that identified by two successive falls in quarterly GDP. We establish our own rule for predicting recession using the fear of unemployment series to predict recession. We show a 10-point rise in the series compared to its previous 12 month low predicted the onset of the Great Recession in both the United States and Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the role of intersectoral networks in the transmission of aggregate technology shocks to sectors' growth. First, we develop a theoretical model to obtain insights into the propagation of shocks through input–output linkages, which suggests that the network effect arises via sectoral downstream linkages. We then quantitatively assess this theoretical implication with United States manufacturing industries, where the aggregate technology shocks are derived from a dynamic factor model. We find that aggregate technology shocks lead to an increase in the output growth of the sector, both directly and indirectly via its intersectoral linkages. More interestingly, we document a crucial role of the intersectoral network channel, which contributes about 50% of the total effect. In addition, the network‐based effect comes mostly from downstream linkages of sectors, which is broadly consistent with theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study constructs a set of regional economic uncertainty (EU) indices for the United States based on Internet search volumes. These indices shed light on EU at the regional and local levels along with national EU. Although aggregate state‐level EU is highly synchronized, idiosyncratic state EU nonetheless exhibits large variations. Similar to aggregate state‐level EU, idiosyncratic state EU is generally countercyclical. There is also a spillover effect among EU in US regions. Lastly, we show that idiosyncratic state EU foreshadows declines in local employment and output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study uses a new business cycle (BC) index and a nonlinear panel smooth transition regression model on quarterly data of 1538 bank holding companies of the United States to investigate response of capital adequacy ratios (CARs) to changes in economic activity. Our findings confirm the existence of nonlinear effects of BC on CARs. Although we use a nonlinear model and a new proxy of BC, our results about CARs are not only consistent with existing mainstream literature but also improve estimation and goodness of the estimation of CARs. The study outcome is useful for policymakers for CARs' standards adjustments during recessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many recent studies have documented the heterogeneous effects of government‐spending shocks on major macroeconomic variables, particularly on output. We delve deeper into the heterogeneous effects of fiscal policy innovations, but focus on the tax policy innovations and their impact on the labor market, while accounting for gender, race, ethnicity, and the business cycle. Using microlevel data from the United States, we find that: (i) Tax shocks have varying employment effects depending on gender, race, and the stage of the business cycle; (ii) Sector, industry, and occupational segregation in labor markets by gender, race, and ethnicity can explain most of the variation in response to fiscal policy shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the residential investment-economic activity nexus in the United States during the period 1960–2020. We find evidence of symmetric and asymmetric frequency-domain Granger causality running unidirectionally from residential investment (RES) to output. This unidirectional causal relationship is both permanent and transitory: transitory shocks in RES have transitory effects on GDP, while permanent shocks in RES have permanent effects on GDP. Our results validate the hypothesis of Fiebiger [2018. 'Semi-Autonomous Household Expenditures as the Causa Causans of Postwar US Business Cycles: The Stability and Instability of Luxemburg-Type External Markets.' Cambridge Journal of Economics 42 (1): 155–175] and Fiebiger and Lavoie [2019. 'Trend and Business Cycles with External Markets: Non-Capacity Generating Semi-Autonomous Expenditures and Effective Demand.' Metroeconomica 70 (2): 247–262], who state that housing investment in the US can be analogous to a Luxemburg-Kalecki external market. Our findings can also be read through the lenses of the recent autonomous demand-led growth literature. In particular, we single out a specific component of autonomous demand and describe its prominent role in the US variety of capitalism. Thus, we conclude that residential investment, despite constituting a small overall share of GDP, is not only the cycle but is also the trend of the US economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]