 Mailing addressUniversity of California, San Diego cnekarda [at] ucsd [dot] edu World Wide Web |
Christopher J. NekardaPh. D. Candidate I am on the job market and will be available for interviews at the 2009 AEA meetings in San Francisco. BiographyI graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000 with highest honors in economics. I spent two years at the Brookings Institution as the statistical associate editor of the Brookings Papers on Economics Activity before beginning a doctorate in economics at the University of California, San Diego. My research focuses on labor markets and macroeconomics and their interaction over business cycle. Research InterestsPrimary: Macroeconomics, labor markets Dissertation AbstractJob Market PaperUnderstanding Unemployment Dynamics: The Role of Time Aggregation This paper uses weekly data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to estimate the role of time aggregation in measuring gross labor force flows and unemployment dynamics. Time aggregation is substantial: gross flows estimated from monthly data understate the true number of transitions by 15–24 percent. Time aggregation in both separations to unemployment and accessions from unemployment comoves positively with the business cycle. The effect from time aggregation on separations is roughly offset by its effect on accessions, however, creating no meaningful cyclical bias in measured gross flows or hazard rates. Contrary to claims by Hall (2006) and Shimer (2007), separation hazard rates calculated from the SIPP and the Current Population Survey are strongly countercyclical and remain so after adjusting for time aggregation. In addition, the separation hazard rate contributes fully one-half of the cyclical variance of the steady-state unemployment rate after adjusting for time aggregation. |