More than five years after the Great Recession ended, the labor market has, by many metrics, finally shown substantial improvement. The unemployment rate is now nearly 4 percentage points below the peak reached in late 2009, and the number of nonfarm payroll jobs has returned to pre-recession levels. However, one lingering concern is the ongoing decline in the labor force participation rate and the concomitant absence of a significant rise in the percentage of the working-age population who are employed. In particular, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent of the...

Exploiting the differential financing needs across industrial sectors, this paper shows that financing constraints of small businesses in the United States are one of the drivers explaining the unemployment dynamics during the Great Recession. We show that workers in small firms are more likely to become unemployed during the 2007-09 financial crisis if they work in industries with high external financing needs. We find very similar results for the 1990-91 recession, but not for the 2001 recession, where only the former was associated with a reduction in loan supply. These findings further...

Exploiting the differential financing needs across industrial sectors, this paper shows that financing constraints of small businesses in the United States are one of the drivers explaining the unemployment dynamics during the Great Recession. We show that workers in small firms are more likely to become unemployed during the 2007-09 financial crisis if they work in industries with high external financing needs. We find very similar results for the 1990-91 recession, but not for the 2001 recession, where only the former was associated with a reduction in loan supply. These findings further...

More than five years after the Great Recession ended, the labor market has, by many metrics, finally shown substantial improvement. The unemployment rate is now nearly 4 percentage points below the peak reached in late 2009, and the number of nonfarm payroll jobs has returned to pre-recession levels. However, one lingering concern is the ongoing decline in the labor force participation rate and the concomitant absence of a significant rise in the percentage of the working-age population who are employed. In particular, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent of the...

I document in this book that firms in the tradable sector have more cyclical asset returns and earning than firms in the non-tradable sector

Several U.S. panel surveys measure household wealth. At the same time, many important questions about household wealth accumulation remain somewhat unresolved. We consider whether measurement error on the existing suite of longitudinal surveys hinders their usefulness for addressing these questions. We review the features of wealth data that make it difficult to collect and assess which assets and debts households are more likely to report accurately. We suggest several considerations in choosing between improving existing surveys and starting a new one.

This paper presents a model of repo rehypothecation in which dealers intermediate funds and collateral between cash lenders (e.g., money market funds) and prime brokerage clients (e.g., hedge funds). Dealers take advantage of their position as intermediaries, setting different repo terms with each counterparty. In particular, the difference in haircuts represents a positive cash balance for the dealer that can be an important source of liquidity. The model shows that dealers with higher default risk are more exposed to runs by collateral providers than to runs by cash lenders, who are...