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Author: Nicolò Dalvit
Publisher:
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This thesis is comprised of three chapters that revolve around two main themes:the micro economic incidence of macro shocks and the role of firms in determining labor market outcomes. In the first chapter I provide new evidence on the cyclical dynamics of firms. I show that firms expecting to lose market share in the futureare hit the hardest during economic downturns. This heterogeneous sensitivity provides a new rationale for the observed counter-cyclical dispersion in firms'growth rates and has implications for the dynamics of aggregate employment. The second chapter studies the role of income tax progressivity in reallocating income risk across heterogeneous workers and stabilizing the economy. We show that eliminating income tax progressivity in Italy would come at the expense of the majority of the work force. The current system of marginal tax rates is effective atreallocating cyclical income risk from low to high wage workers and reducesaggregate employment volatility compared to a counter-factual flat rate system.The third chapter considers the internal hierarchical structure of a firm and its rolein determining wages and internal promotions. We focus in particular on the rolethat internal hierarchies play in propagating gender differences in representation and pay. We study the effect of a change in the gender composition at the top afirm's internal hierarchy on workers further down the organizational ladder and findsome evidence of an effect only on layers close to the top.
Author: Nicolò Dalvit
Publisher:
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This thesis is comprised of three chapters that revolve around two main themes:the micro economic incidence of macro shocks and the role of firms in determining labor market outcomes. In the first chapter I provide new evidence on the cyclical dynamics of firms. I show that firms expecting to lose market share in the futureare hit the hardest during economic downturns. This heterogeneous sensitivity provides a new rationale for the observed counter-cyclical dispersion in firms'growth rates and has implications for the dynamics of aggregate employment. The second chapter studies the role of income tax progressivity in reallocating income risk across heterogeneous workers and stabilizing the economy. We show that eliminating income tax progressivity in Italy would come at the expense of the majority of the work force. The current system of marginal tax rates is effective atreallocating cyclical income risk from low to high wage workers and reducesaggregate employment volatility compared to a counter-factual flat rate system.The third chapter considers the internal hierarchical structure of a firm and its rolein determining wages and internal promotions. We focus in particular on the rolethat internal hierarchies play in propagating gender differences in representation and pay. We study the effect of a change in the gender composition at the top afirm's internal hierarchy on workers further down the organizational ladder and findsome evidence of an effect only on layers close to the top.
Author: George Bitros
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781782543602
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
The distinguished contributors in this volume provide a variety of essays, which are written in honor of Emmanuel Drandakis. These essays fall into four uniform areas of economics: economic growth, general equilibrium, labor economics and game theory and applications. The editors focus on a select set of issues that stand high on the agenda of academic research. They provide fresh insights and approaches to the analysis of these issues, and thus open up wider avenues for our understanding of the dilemmas posed for theory and policy. Readers are offered new empirical evidence on such thorny social problems as, for example, unemployment, the intergenerational transmission of human capital and the response of wages to price and endowment changes.
Author: Neil Ware White (IV)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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This dissertation examines the impacts on the labor market of monetary policy and macroeconomic uncertainty. The first chapter examines how monetary policy shocks in the U.S. affect the flows of workers among three labor market categories--employment, unemployment, and non-participation--and assesses each flow's relative importance to changes in labor market "stock'' variables like the unemployment rate. I find that job loss accounts for the largest portion of monetary policy's effect on labor markets. I develop a New Keynesian model that incorporates these channels and show how a central bank can achieve welfare gains from targeting job loss, rather than output, in an otherwise standard Taylor rule. The second chapter examines the role of monetary policy in "job polarization.'' I argue that contractionary monetary policy has accelerated the decline of employment in routine occupations, which largely affected workers with a high-school degree but no college. In part by disproportionately affecting industries with high shares of routine occupations, contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to large and persistent shifts away from routine employment. Expansionary shocks, on the other hand, have little effect on these industries. Indeed, monetary policy's effect on overall employment is concentrated in routine jobs. These results highlight monetary policy's role in generating fluctuations not only in the level of employment, but also the composition of employment across occupations and industries. The third chapter introduces new direct measures of uncertainty derived from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The series underlying these new measures are more strongly correlated with economic activity than many other series that are the basis for uncertainty proxies. The survey also facilitates comparison with response dispersion or disagreement, a commonly used proxy for uncertainty in the literature. Dispersion measures have low or negative correlation with direct measures of uncertainty and often have causal effects of opposite sign, suggesting that they are poor proxies for uncertainty. For the measures based on series most closely correlated with economic activity, positive uncertainty shocks are mildly expansionary. This result is robust across identification and estimation strategies and is consistent with "growth options'' theories of the effects of uncertainty.
Author: Dongchen Zhao
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter concerns the secular changes in the U.S. firm size distribution and firm dynamics. This chapter sets up a quantitative model of firm dynamics with debt heterogeneity to study the implications of changes in real interest rates for the firm size distribution and firm dynamics. It shows that the decline in long-term real interest rates since the early 1980s can account for a significant fraction of the shift in employment shares to large firms as well as the decline in firms per capita and firm entry rates experienced in the U.S. over the same period. In the model, firms endogenously choose financial intermediaries issuing debt with either earnings-based (EBC) or asset-based (ABC) borrowing constraints. The two types of constraints arise naturally from the imperfect enforceability of debt contracts and are in line with recent empirical findings. A decline in real interest rates benefits firms with EBC more because they are not constrained by their assets and can expand more due to increased earnings. Since firms with higher earnings optimally choose earnings-based lending, the decline in real interest rates shifts employment shares to larger firms. Moreover, the growth of large firms crowds out smaller firms and firm entry through general equilibrium effects. The paper tests the mechanism in cross-country data from the OECD and finds a stronger association between the decline in real interest rates and changes in firm dynamics, especially in countries with deeper credit markets. In the second chapter, I study the effects of government regulations on firm dynamism. The impact of government regulations on the economy is a central topic in policy debates. However, due to the endogeneity of regulations and challenges in measuring them, these debates remain contentious. This paper establishes the causal effects of government regulations on firm dynamism by employing a novel shift-share (Bartik) instrument in conjunction with the RegData dataset, which quantifies regulations based on the text of federal regulatory documents. The primary assumption for identification is that, for each sector, the exposure to regulations from different government agencies at the beginning of the period is exogenous to any confounding factors. The findings reveal that government regulatory restrictions significantly increase firm exit rates and discourage the formation of establishments, while having no substantial impact on firm entry. Furthermore, these restrictions contribute to reduced job creation, elevated job destruction, and diminished overall employment. These effects are consistently observed across various age groups. The results lend support to the idea that government regulations can raise production costs for firms and/or enhance the monopolistic power of certain companies. Both mechanisms can diminish the profits of affected firms, leading to increased firm exit rates and reduced labor demand. Additionally, the findings refute the interpretation of regulations as solely serving as entry barriers. The final chapter of the dissertation investigates the labor market outcomes for involuntary part-time workers and their subsequent effects on welfare levels. Through an analysis of survey data, I demonstrate that involuntary part-time workers exhibit reservation wages comparable to those of unemployed workers. This similarity largely stems from parallel wage offers and offer arrival rates. Contrary to previous research, this finding indicates that involuntary part-time workers experience welfare levels akin to unemployed workers. One possible explanation for this discrepancy lies in the methodology of prior studies. Conclusions drawn from earlier research, which primarily focused on the faster transition of involuntary part-time workers into full-time positions compared to other workers, may be flawed. This is because these workers also tend to revert to their previous job types at a faster rate. To further explore the implications of these discoveries, I employ a quantitative search model. The calibrated model supports the assertion that involuntary part-time workers experience welfare levels similar to those of unemployed workers. Furthermore, the model suggests that neither extending unemployment insurance to part-time workers nor enhancing the likelihood that unemployed workers transition to part-time positions would effectively increase the prevalence of full-time employment
Author: Jeremy Rastouil
Publisher:
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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During the Great Recession, the interactions between housing, labor and entry highlight the existence of narrow propagation channels between these markets. The aim of this thesis is to shed a light on labor market interactions with firm entry and financial business cycles, by building on the recent theoretical and empirical of DSGE models. In the first chapter, we have found evidence of the key role of the net entry as an amplifying mechanism for employment dynamics. Introducing search and matching frictions, we have studied from a new perspective the cyclicality of the mark-up compared to previous researches that use Walrasian labor market. We found a less countercyclical markup due to the acyclical aspect of the marginal cost in the DMP framework and a reduced role according to firm's entry in the cyclicality of the markup. In the second chapter, we have linked the borrowing capacity of households to their employment situation on the labor market. With this new microfoundation of the collateral constraint, new matches on the labor market translate into more mortgages, while separation induces an exclusion from financial markets for jobseekers. As a result, the LTV becomes endogenous by responding procyclically to employment fluctuations. We have shown that this device is empirically relevant and solves the anomalies of the standard collateral constraint. In the last chapter, we extend the analysis developed in the previous one by integrating collateral constrained firms in order to have a more complete financial business cycle. The first result is that an entrepreneur collateral constraint integrating capital, real commercial estate and wage bill in advance is empirically relevant compared to the collateral literature associated to the labor market which does not consider these three assets. The second finding is the role of the housing price and credit squeezes in the rise of the unemployment rate during the Great Recession. The last two chapters have important implications for economic policy. A structural deregulation reform in the labor market induces a significant rise in the debt level for households and housing price, combined with a substantial rise of firm debt. Our approach allows us to reveal that a macroprudential policy aiming to tighten the LTV ratio for household borrowers has positive effects in the long run for output and employment, while tightening LTV ratios for entrepreneurs leads to the opposite effect.
Author: Jong-Seok Oh
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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This dissertation examines the macroeconomic impact of reduced labor market friction on the U.S. business cycle after the mid-1980s. The first two essays investigate the relationship between labor market flexibility and macroeconomic stability from a post-Keynesian perspective. In the third essay which reviews the relationship between labor market flexibility and patterns of U.S. business cycle, I test the argument that after 1985 Okun's coefficient became larger due to the flexible labor market. In essay 1, considering two aspects of labor market flexibility, employment flexibility and real wage flexibility, I adopt the flex-output model (Skott, 2015) to first discuss employment flexibility and then extend it by incorporating real wage dynamics induced from a wage-price Phillips curve (Flaschel and Krolzig, 2006) to address real wage flexibility. The simulation of model explains that employment flexibility increases instability of an economy whereas real wage flexibility reduces it. Empirical results of this paper suggest that during the Great Moderation, real wage flexibility played a major role in stabilizing the U.S. economy. On the other hand, employment flexibility has contributed to destabilizing the economy during the Great Recession. In essay 2, using structural VAR analysis, I provide more rigorous empirical evidence to support the hypothesis in essay 1 - real wage flexibility played a major role in stabilizing U.S. economy during the Great Moderation, and employment flexibility has contributed to destabilizing the economy during the Great Recession. I found that during the Great Moderation (1) Employment and real wage flexibilities were operating simultaneously; (2) The employment flexibility was not so severe; (3) Flexible real wages functioned as an autonomic stabilizer; (4) Therefore, stabilized goods market during the Great Moderation can be explained by dominating effect of the real wage flexibility over the employment flexibility. For the Great Recession, however, severe asymmetry in the business cycle and the lack of observations obstructs reliable empirical work. In essay 3, I discuss the observations of increased cyclicality in aggregate hours and increased responsiveness of the (un)employment rate to output changes after 1985, which have contributed to recent debate about the validity of Okun's law. To investigate this, I measure Okun's coefficients in three phases of the business cycle - recessions, early expansions and late expansions. Related findings include: (1) The main determining factor for an increased coefficient for aggregate hours is the increased responsiveness of the employment rate during late expansions. (2) The increased responsiveness of hours per employee in early expansion is another main determining factor for more reactive aggregate hours. These findings conflict with the flexible labor market hypothesis that focuses mainly on firms' firing behaviors during recessions when they incur less costs than previously.
Author: Sang Yup Choi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 130
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This dissertation studies how financial market volatility or uncertainty in the U.S. economy affects real economic activity both in the U.S. and other open economies. Chapter 1 critically examines a stylized fact about the effects of uncertainty shocks on the U.S. economy. A link between uncertainty and firms' investment, hiring, and production decisions has drawn much attention in contemporary discussions after the 2008 financial crisis. Bloom (2009) showed that uncertainty events, identified by spikes in stock market volatility, triggered immediate falls in output and employment, followed by rapid rebounds. I show that such stock market volatility shocks failed to produce this same pattern of responses after 1983. Chapter 2 studies the effects of risk aversion shocks, measured by increases in the VIX, on emerging market economies (EMEs). By estimating a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model, I find that, although risk aversion shocks do not have much impact on U.S. output, they do have a noticeable impact on the output of EMEs. To explain the contrast between the impact of risk appetite shocks on EMEs and the impact on the U.S. economy, a credit channel is proposed as a propagation mechanism. In the model, an increase in the VIX is translated to a risk-aversion shock that generates a "flight to quality." As international investors pull their money from EMEs, borrowing costs increase and domestic credit falls as a consequence of credit market imperfections. Higher borrowing costs, in turn, lead to a fall in investment that causes a real depreciation and a decline in total output through sectoral linkages. Finally, Chapter 3, which is co-authored with Prakash Loungani, studies the effect of uncertainty shocks on unemployment dynamics by separating out the role of aggregate and sectoral channels. Using SP500 data from the first quarter of 1963 through the third quarter of 2014, we construct a separate index to measure sectoral uncertainty and compare its effects on the unemployment rate with that of aggregate uncertainty in a standard VAR model, augmented by a local projection method. We find that aggregate uncertainty shocks lead to an immediate increase in unemployment, followed by swift reversals. In contrast, sectoral uncertainty shocks have a long-lasting impact on unemployment, with the peak impact occurring after two years. Our findings highlight an additional channel through which uncertainty shocks have persistent effects on unemployment by requiring substantial inter-industry labor reallocation.
Author: Seungho Nah
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 129
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Abstract: In the first essay, 'Financial Frictions, Intersectoral Adjustment Costs, and News-Driven Business Cycles', I show that an RBC model with financial frictions and intersectoral adjustment costs can generate sizable boom-bust cycles and plausible responses of stock prices in response to a news shock. Booms in the labor market, which make it possible for both consumption and investment to increase in response to positive news, are caused through two channels: the increases in value of marginal product of labor and the increases in value of collateral. Both of these channels enable firms to hire more workers. Intersectoral adjustment costs contribute to both channels by increasing the relative price of output and capital during expansions. Financial frictions enter in the forms of collateral constraints on firms, which influence the latter channel, and the financial accelerator mechanism driven by agency costs, which amplifies all the key variables. My model differs from previous studies in its ability to generate boom-bust cycles without restricting the functional form of consumption in household preferences and without requiring investment adjustment costs, variable capital utilization, or any nominal rigidities. In the second essay, 'Financial and Real Frictions as Sources of Business Fluctuations', I show that a negative shock to a financial or real friction in an economy can generate quantitatively significant and persistent recessions, even without a decrease in exogenous aggregate total factor productivity in a heterogeneous agents DSGE model. The increase in uncertainty that a firm is facing when it makes capital adjustment, however, is found to have a limited or dubious influence on economic activities. The roles of collateral constaints as a financial friction and nonconvex capital adjustment costs as a real friction in aggregate fluctuations are examined in this propagation mechanism. When these frictions become strengthened, the degree of capital misallocation is intensified, which leads to a drop of endogenous aggregate total factor productivity. As agents expect that the return to investment and endogenous TFP decrease, they reduce aggregate investment sharply, which also leads to a drop in employment. Interruption of efficient resource allocation coming from these two frictions is found out to be enough to generate a large and persistent aggregate flucutations even without introducing heterogeneity in firm-level productivity.
Author: Joseph E. Stiglitz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262012058
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 722
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Book Description
The focus of Joseph Stiglitz's work in economics throughout his long and distinguished career has been on the real world, with all of its imperfections.
Author: Mathew Forstater
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135981205
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 478
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Book Description
Edited by three very well known academics in the field and contributed to by John Smithin, Laurence Moss and G. C. Harcourt, this volume reflects the breath of the honouree‘s interests and as such it covers a wide range of topics including political economy, labour economics, history of economic thought and macroeconomics.Ingrid Rima, one of the fi
