The Effects of the Loss of Skills on Unemployment Fluctuations

This paper studies the effects of the loss of skills on the persistence of unemployment and other macroeconomic variables. It combines a Real Business Cycle model with a search and matching labor market to explain how the loss of skill of workers and the subsequent decrease in their probability of finding new jobs creates more persistent business cycles. The paper proves that the introduction of this mechanism improves the performance of the model and is able to replicate cross country differences in unemployment and output persistence