On the Cyclical Behavior of Employment, Unemployment and Labor Force Participation

Abstract

In this paper I evaluate to what extent a real business cycle (RBC) model that incorporates search and leisure decisions can simultaneously account for the observed behavior of employment, unemployment and out-of-the-labor-force. This contrasts with the previous RBC literature, which analyzed employment or hours fluctuations by either lumping together unemployment and out-of-the-labor-force into a single non-employment state or assuming a fixed labor force participation. Once the three employment states are explicitly introduced I find that the RBC model generates highly counterfactual labor market dynamics.