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Working Paper
Employment Dynamics in a Signaling Model with Workers' Incentives
Many firms adjust employment in a "lumpy" manner -- infrequently and in large bursts. In this paper, I show that lumpy adjustments can arise from concerns about the incentives of remaining workers. Specifically, I develop a model in which a firm's productivity depends on its workers' effort and workers' income prospects depend on the firm's profitability. I use this model to analyze the consequences of demand shocks that are observed by the firm but not by its workers, who can only try to infer the firm's profitability from its employment decisions. I show that the resulting signaling model ...
Working Paper
The Timing of Mass Layoff Episodes : Evidence from U.S. Microdata
This paper studies employment decisions at U.S. companies over the 2007-2012 period, during and after the Great Recession. To this end, I build a panel dataset that matches publicly-listed companies' financial reports to their announced layoff episodes. Using limited dependent variable regressions, I find that layoffs respond to accumulated changes in a company's financial conditions. While recent financial changes have the largest impacts on layoff propensities, financial changes over at least four previous quarters appear to have additional marginal effects.