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Journal Article
Do Credit Supply Shocks Constrain Employment Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises?
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) made outsized contributions to net employment growth during the pandemic recession and recovery. However, credit conditions have tightened significantly during the past year and might hinder growth for small firms going forward. Using data on bank lending to small businesses and employment growth, we estimate that a tightening in bank credit supply of 1 percentage point is associated with an 11 percent decline in SMEs' net job creation rate. This estimate indicates that a bank credit tightening about one-third the size of the tightening observed ...
Working Paper
The economics of labor adjustment : mind the gap
We study inferences about the dynamics of labor adjustment obtained by the "gap methodology" of Caballero and Engel [1993] and Caballero, Engel and Haltiwanger [1997]. In that approach, the policy function for employment growth is assumed to depend on an unobservable gap between the target and current levels of employment. Using time series observations, these studies reject the partial adjustment model and find that aggregate employment dynamics depend on the cross-sectional distribution of employment gaps. Thus, nonlinear adjustment at the plant level appears to have aggregate ...
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 ...
Journal Article
Has the U.S. economy become less interest rate sensitive?
Jonathan Willis and Guangye Cao investigate shifts in the economy?s sensitivity to interest rates by examining how total employment responds to changes in monetary policy.
Journal Article
Stuck in Part-Time Employment
Although the share of workers employed part time for economic reasons has declined, it is unlikely to return to its pre-recession level in the near future.
Working Paper
Real Rigidities, Firm Dynamics, and Monetary Nonneutrality: The Role of Demand Shocks
We propose a parsimonious framework for real rigidities, in the form of strategic complementarities, that can generate real and nominal dynamics and match key features of the data across several literatures. Existing menu-cost models featuring strategic complementarities require unrealistically volatile shocks to idiosyncratic productivity to be consistent with pricing moments. We develop a simple menu-cost model with strategic complementarities along with idiosyncratic productivity and demand shocks that are disciplined by the data. This approach allows us to overcome previous criticism from ...
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 ...
Working Paper
The cost of labor adjustment : inferences from the gap
We study labor adjustment costs. We specify a dynamic optimization problem at the plant-level, allowing for both convex and non-convex adjustment costs. We estimate the parameters of the adjustment process using an indirect inference procedure in which simulated moments are matched with data moments. For this study we use estimates of reduced form adjustment functions obtained by the "gap methodology" reported in Caballero and Engel (1993). Contrary to evidence at the micro level in support of non-convex adjustment costs, our preliminary findings indicate that piecewise quadratic adjustment ...
Working Paper
New exporter dynamics
Models in which heterogeneous plants face sunk export entry costs are standard tools in the international trade literature. How well do these models account for the observed dynamics of new exporters? We document that new exporters initially export small amounts and ? conditional on continuing in the export market ? grow gradually over several years. New exporters are most likely to exit the export market in their first few years. We construct a dynamic discrete choice model of exporting and find that the standard model cannot replicate the behavior of new exporters: New exporters grow too ...
Journal Article
What happened to the gains from strong productivity growth?
Over the past decade, the United States economy has experienced strong economic growth due in large part to a resurgence in productivity growth. Little attention has been paid, however, to examining how the gains from this growth have been distributed. In the past few years, observers have noted that the share of income paid to labor has been falling while corporate profits have surged. Also, observers have pointed out that income inequality appears to have widened, with little increase in real wages for low-income workers while executive pay has skyrocketed. Consequently, there has been a ...