Search Results
Discussion Paper
Assisting Firms during a Crisis: Benefits and Costs
Public and private efforts to reduce COVID-19 infection levels have led to a sharp drop in economic activity around the world. In an attempt to mitigate the damage to businesses, governments around the world have implemented a variety of financial programs to help firms. These programs have been criticized as interfering with markets, providing bailouts, and creating adverse incentives. In this article, I review both the rationale for government-provided assistance and the costs of providing that assistance from the perspective of how that aid effects the likely level and volatility of ...
Working Paper
Tracking Real Time Layoffs with SEC Filings: A Preliminary Investigation
We explore a new source of data on layoffs: timely 8-K filings with the Securities and and Exchange Commission. We develop measures of both the number of reported layoff events and the number of affected workers. These series are highly correlated with the business cycle and other layoff indicators. Linking firm-level reported layoff events with WARN notices suggests that 8-K filings are sometimes available before WARN notices, and preliminary regression results suggest our layoff series are useful for forecasting. We also document the industry composition of the data and specific areas ...
Working Paper
Quits, Layoffs, and Labor Supply
We develop a time series of quits and layoffs using the Current Population Survey, and analyze their relationship with labor supply decisions over the business cycle. Our findings challenge the assumption that most labor force exits from employment are voluntary quits. Instead, we show that 40% of these exits are precipitated by layoffs. With this distinction, we find both quits to non-participation and the share of workers exiting after a layoff falls during recessions. A workhorse search model is used to frame how these facts add nuance to our understanding of business cycles. Additional ...
Journal Article
Assisting Firms during a Crisis: Benefits and Costs
Public and private efforts to reduce COVID-19 infection levels have led to a sharp drop in economic activity around the world. In an attempt to mitigate the damage to businesses, governments around the world have implemented a variety of financial programs to help firms. These programs have been criticized as interfering with markets, providing bailouts, and creating adverse incentives. In this article, I review both the rationale for government-provided assistance and the costs of providing that assistance from the perspective of how that aid effects the likely level and volatility of ...
Working Paper
Pandemic Layoffs and the Role of Stay-At-Home Orders
We compile a novel high-frequency, detailed geographic dataset on mass layoffs from U.S. state labor departments. Using recent advances in difference-in-difference estimation with staggered treatment, we find that locally-mandated stay-at-home orders issued March 16–22, 2020 triggered mass layoffs equal to half a percent of the population in just one week. Our findings contribute to explanations for why job loss in 2020 was synchronous and catastrophic, yet temporary.
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 ...
Back-of-the-Envelope Estimates of Next Quarter’s Unemployment Rate
Layoffs are certainly one of the effects of battling COVID-19. What sort of unemployment rate might we see in the second quarter of 2020?
Journal Article
All Layoffs Are Not Created Equal
More layoffs are intended to be temporary than conventional measures would suggest. Shigeru Fujita explains how this undercounting occurs and its surprising implications for today's problem of long-term unemployment.
Working Paper
A Theory of Non-Coasean Labor Markets
We develop a theory of labor markets in a monetary economy with four realistic features: search frictions, worker productivity shocks, wage rigidity, and two-sided lack of commitment. Due to the non-Coasean nature of labor contracts, inefficient job separations occur in the form of endogenous quits and layoffs that are unilaterally initiated whenever a worker’s wage-to-productivity ratio moves outside an inaction region. We derive sufficient statistics for the aggregate labor market response to a monetary shock based on the distribution of workers’ wage-to-productivity ratios. These ...
Working Paper
Sticky Wages on the Layoff Margin
We design and field an innovative survey of unemployment insurance (UI) recipients that yields new insights about wage stickiness on the layoff margin. Most UI recipients express a willingness to accept wage cuts of 5-10 percent to save their jobs, and one-third would accept a 25 percent cut. Yet worker-employer discussions about cuts in pay, benefits, or hours in lieu of layoffs are exceedingly rare. When asked why employers don’t raise the possibility of job-preserving pay cuts, four-in-ten UI recipients don’t know. Sixteen percent say cuts would undermine morale or lead the best ...