The unemployment accelerator
"This paper studies the unemployment accelerator, a mechanism where workers directly affect the firms’ financial conditions, and, in turn, firms’ financial conditions feedback again to the real economy. The unemployment accelerator builds on two key assumptions: search frictions in the labor ma...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Institution: | ETUI-European Trade Union Institute |
| Format: | TEXT |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Munich
2016
CESifo |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.labourline.org/KENTIKA-909212472749-The-unemployment-accelerator.htm |
| Summary: | "This paper studies the unemployment accelerator, a mechanism where workers directly affect the firms’ financial conditions, and, in turn, firms’ financial conditions feedback again to the real economy. The unemployment accelerator builds on two key assumptions: search frictions in the labor market and firms’ default risk. The former assumption implies a positive relation between the firm’s value and its number of workers; the latter assumption entails a tight connection between the value of the workers and the firm’s incentives to default. We develop and estimate a model with these two frictions together with firm-level heterogeneity; and show the model matches firm-level statistics as well as business cycle fluctuations in labor and financial markets. We provide compelling micro-evidence of the unemployment accelerator: a 10% increase in a firm’s number of workers is associated with a 4% increase in its market value and a 6% decline in its probability of default. We show that our model can account for these facts, and that the two key assumptions we make are essential for this." |
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| Physical Description: | 89 p. Digital |