This paper uses a measure of skill mismatch to separate wage flexibility from confounding variation in wages driven by differences job quality over the business cycle. I first show that high cyclicality switchers' goes beyond cyclical movements mismatch. Then uncover large across distribution. Among incumbent workers, are acyclical good matches but procyclical poor matches, particular for overq...

Our analysis based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth for the 1978–1999 period concludes that men’s greater representation in cyclical occupational groups, such as craftsmen, operatives, and laborers, more than accounts for the gap between men and women in the cyclicality of real wages. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Bond yield and retail interest rate spreads are presumed to lead real activity on the basis of financial accelerator mechanisms, markup cyclicality or simply because they are forward-looking. Empirical results for Austria show that retail rate spreads outperform many other indicators in this respect. Nevertheless, there is no evidence for a financial accelerator being behind this finding.

This paper examines whether fair value accounting increases the pro-cyclicality of banks’ lending behavior. Exploiting cross-sectional variation in individual banks’ exposure to fair value accounting, I find that fair value accounting does not exacerbate the pro-cyclicality of bank lending over the past two business cycles during 1995-2010. This result holds despite the fact that every one doll...

Abstract Safe asset shortages can expose an economy to liquidity traps. The nature of these traps is determined by the cyclicality bond premium. A counter-cyclical premium opens possibility expectations-driven in which small issuances government debt crowd out private and reduce output. In contrast, when pro-cyclical a trap, expansionary. data, we find evidence Large interventions prevent emerg...