Hiring Freeze and Bankruptcy in Unemployment Dynamics

This paper proposes a matching model that distinguishes between job creation by existing firms and job creation by firm entrants. The paper argues that vacancy posting and job destruction on the extensive margin, i.e. from firms that enter and exit the labour market, represents a potentially viable mechanism for understanding the cyclical properties of vacancies and unemployment. The model features both hiring freeze and bankruptcies, where the former represents a sudden shut down of vacancy posting at the firm level with labour downsizing governed by natural turnover. A bankrupt firm, conversely, shut down its vacancies and lay offs its stock of workers. Recent research in macroeconomics has shown that a calibration of the Mortensen and Pissarides matching model account for 10 percent of the cyclical variability of the vacancy unemployment ratio displayed by U.S. data. A calibration of the model that explicitly considers hiring freeze and bankruptcy can account for 20 to 35 percent of the variability displayed by the data.unemployment dynamics, matching models

Hiring Freeze and Bankruptcy in Unemployment Dynamics

This paper proposes a matching model that distinguishes between job creation by existing firms and job creation by firm entrants. The paper argues that vacancy posting and job destruction on the extensive margin, i.e. from firms that enter and exit the labour market, represents a potentially viable mechanism for understanding the cyclical properties of vacancies and unemployment. The model features both hiring freeze and bankruptcies, where the former represents a sudden shut down of vacancy posting at the firm level with labour downsizing governed by natural turnover. A bankrupt firm, conversely, shut down its vacancies and lay offs its stock of workers. Recent research in macroeconomics has shown that a calibration of the Mortensen and Pissarides matching model account for 10 percent of the cyclical variability of the vacancy unemployment ratio displayed by U.S. data. A calibration of the model that explicitly considers hiring freeze and bankruptcy can account for 20 to 35 percent of the variability displayed by the dataunemployment dynamics, matching models

Two Tier Reforms of Employment Protection: A Honeymoon Effect?

Labor market reforms increasing flexibility at the margin have been recently paying out in terms of employment growth. This paper argues that two-tier labor market reforms have a transitional honeymoon, job creating effect. In a dynamic model of labor demand under uncertainty, the paper predicts that in the aftermath of reforms, beyond an increase in employment, there should be a reduction in employment inaction and in the mean and cross sectional variance of labor productivity. Based on a variety of firm-level data on Italy in the period 1995-2000, we find evidence of our empirical implications.Labour demand, firing costs, employment protection reform.

Equilibrium Search Unemployment, Endogenous Participation and Labor Market Flows.

The sustainability of Welfare States requires high employment/high participation to raise the tax base and avoid distortions. To analyse labour market participation decisions in a world with market frictions, we propose and solve a three-state macro model of the labour market. We show that workers' decisions of entering into the labour market and exiting from the labour market are fundamentally different in the presence of frictions: irreversible costs paid by workers at the entry level imply that labour supply is determined by two margins, the entry and the exit margins. On the normative point of view, we show that the existence of two margins alters significantly the conventional effects of payroll taxes and unemployment benefits. On the positive point of view, our model rationalizes the existence of most labour market flows and of 'marginally attached workers'. Furthermore, a calibration improves the usual representations of labour markets.

Equilibrium Employment and Labor Markets Imperfections: Matching vs. Participation costs. UQAM-CIRPEE Conference on Labor Market Frictions and Macroeconomic Dynamics, October 3-4 2003.

Cette publication n'a pas de résumé

The Structure and History of Italian Unemployment

This paper reviews the Italian unemployment experience, analyzing in particular the time-series behavior of unemployment rates along the path that brought Italy into Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union, and their disaggregated structure across geographical and demographic dimensions. High aggregate unemployment is a reflection of highly concentrated unemployment, especially along geographical dimensions but also among relatively young workers. Its evolution resulted historically from well-understood interactions of macroeconomic events and institutional configurations. We also review recent developments and reform tensions

Equilibrium EMployment in a Model of IMperfect Labour Market

This paper presents a simple model of imperfect labor markets with endogenous labor market participation and home production. We show that a two-sector economy (home and market) implies a three-state labor market when labor market imperfections take the form of an irreversible entry cost incurred by workers. This simple framework brings several results. First, it delivers an expression for the employment rate and as side-products, a measure of the unemployment rate and the size of the labor force. Second, it rationalizes several empirical works on the definition of unemployment in labor force surveys. Third, it derives endogenously all flows between three labor market states. Fourth, a calibration of the model rationalizes differences in employment rates: in the U.S., we find a market productivity premium of +30% and market frictions of -15% compared to France. Finally, the model is a very simple reduced form of search models with which it is fully consistent: the irreversible entry cost is the opportunity cost of search and depends on aggregate conditionsemployment, non-employment, labor market participation, frictions

Shadow Sorting

This paper investigates the border between formal employment, shadow employment, and unemployment in an equilibrium model of the labor market with market frictions. From the labor demand side, firms optimally create legal or shadow employment through a mechanism that is akin to tax evasion. From the labor supply side, heterogeneous workers sort across the two sectors, with high productivity workers entering the legal sector. Such worker sorting appears fully consistent with most empirical evidence on shadow employment. The model sheds also light on the "shadow puzzle", the increasing size of the shadow economy in OECD countries in spite of improvements in technologies detecting tax and social security evasion. Shadow employment is correlated with unemployment, and it is tolerated because the repression of shadow activity increases unemployment. The model implies that shadow wage gaps should be lower in depressed labor markets and that deregulation of labor markets is accompanied by a decline in the average skills of the workforce in both legal and shadow sectors. Based on micro data on two countries with a sizeable shadow economy, Italy and Braziil, we find empirical support to these implications of the model. The paper suggests also that policies aimed at reducing the shadow economy are likely to increase unemployment.Unemployment, Matching, Shadow Activity.

Inflation Risk and Portfolio Allocation in the Banking System

This paper proposes theory and evidence on the relationship between inflation and the bank's portfolio allocation. The proposed idea rationalized what Rodriguez (1992) pointed out with respect to the Central Bank of Argentina, behaving as a "borrower of first resort", where banks reallocated their investment from the private sector to government bonds. A main component of inflation costs is the misallocation of resources, this paper shows a channel through the reallocation of credits, where the credit market for the private sector trend to disappear. Theoretically, this paper studies the behavior of risk-neutral financiers in a world in which monitoring costs, and limited liability on the part of firms leads to credit rationing equilibria. In light of the well established relation between inflation and changes in relative prices, the theoretical model rationalizes the relationship between inflation and the allocation of capital in the banking system. Empirically, it looks at the dynamic behavior of the composition of bank's assets in Argentina between 1983 and 1998, which shows a robust relationship between relative price variability and bank's allocation in government denominated assets.