Search Results
Working Paper
Job-to-job flows and the consequences of job separations
This paper extends the literature on the earnings losses of displaced workers to provide a more comprehensive picture of the earnings and employment outcomes for workers who separate. First, we compare workers who separate from distressed employers (presumably displaced workers) and those who separate from stable or growing employers. Second, we distinguish between workers who do and do not experience a spell of joblessness. Third, we examine the full distribution of earnings outcomes from separations - not the impact on only the average worker. We find that earnings outcomes depend much less ...
Working Paper
Euler-equation estimation for discrete choice models: a capital accumulation application
This paper studies capital adjustment at the establishment level. Our goal is to characterize capital adjustment costs, which are important for understanding both the dynamics of aggregate investment and the impact of various policies on capital accumulation. Our estimation strategy searches for parameters that minimize ex post errors in an Euler equation. This strategy is quite common in models for which adjustment occurs in each period. Here, we extend that logic to the estimation of parameters of dynamic optimization problems in which non-convexities lead to extended periods of investment ...
Working Paper
Early Joiners and Startup Performance
We show that early joiners---non-founder employees in the first year of a startup---play a critical role in explaining firm performance. We use administrative employee-employer matched data on all US startups and utilize the premature death of workers as a natural experiment exogenously separating talent from young firms. We find that losing an early joiner has a large negative effect on firm size that persists for at least ten years. When compared to that of a founder, losing an early joiner has a smaller effect on firm death but intensive margin effects on firm size are similar in ...
Working Paper
High-Growth Firms in the United States: Key Trends and New Data Opportunities
Using administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we introduce a new public-use database that tracks activities across firm growth distributions over time. With these new data, we uncover several key trends for high-growth firms---critical engines of innovation and economic growth. First, the share of firms that are high-growth has steadily decreased over the past four decades, driven not only by falling rates of entrepreneurship but also languishing growth among existing firms. Second, this decline is particularly pronounced among young and small firms, while the share of high-growth ...
Working Paper
Declining Dynamism, Allocative Efficiency, and the Productivity Slowdown
A large literature documents declining measures of business dynamism including high-growth young firm activity and job reallocation. A distinct literature describes a slowdown in the pace of aggregate labor productivity growth. We relate these patterns by studying changes in productivity growth from the late 1990s to the mid 2000s using firm-level data. We find that diminished allocative efficiency gains can account for the productivity slowdown in a manner that interacts with the within-firm productivity growth distribution. The evidence suggests that the decline in dynamism is reason for ...
Working Paper
Dynamics of labor demand : evidence from plant-level observations and aggregate implications
This paper studies the dynamics of labor demand at the micro and aggregate level. The correlation of hours and employment growth is negative at the plant level and positive in aggregate time series. Further, hours and employment growth are about equally volatile at the plant level while hours growth is much less volatile than employment growth in the aggregate data. Given these differences, we specify and estimate the parameters of a plant-level dynamic optimization problem using simulated method of moments to match plant-level observations. Our findings indicate that non-convex adjustment ...
Journal Article
Gross job flows between plants and industries
A remarkable feature of the current U.S. economic expansion has been its ability to shrug off the adverse effects of financial crises and economic slowdowns around the world for nearly two years. Recently, however, foreign-sector developments have triggered a sizable shift in the sectoral composition of U.S. employment. By early 1999, employment growth in the goods-producing sector was still humming along. Historically, substantial shifts in labor demand between sectors have been correlated with the business cycle. But recent developments are unusual and highlight our incomplete ...
Working Paper
The establishment-level behavior of vacancies and hiring
The authors study vacancies, hires, and vacancy yields (success rate in generating hires) in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, a large representative sample of U.S. employers. The authors also develop a simple framework that identifies the monthly flow of new vacancies and the job-filling rate for vacant positions, the employer counterpart to the job-finding rate for unemployed workers. The job-filling rate moves counter to employment at the aggregate level but rises steeply with employer growth rates in the cross section. It falls with employer size, rises with the worker turnover ...
Working Paper
Limited countercyclical policies: an exploratory study