The importance of hiring frictions in business cycles

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Faccini, Renato; Yashiv, Eran
• 署名单位: Tel Aviv University
• 刊物名称: QUANTITATIVE ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1759-7323
• DOI: 10.3982/QE1512
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 1101-1143
• 关键词: business cycles; propagation and amplification; markup cyclicality; hiring as investment; intertemporal allocation; confluence of hiring and price frictions; E22; E24; E32; E52

摘要

Hiring is a costly activity reflecting firms' investment in their workers. Microdata show that hiring costs involve production disruption. Thus, cyclical fluctuations in the value of output, induced by price frictions, have consequences for the optimal allocation of hiring activities. We outline a mechanism based on cyclical markup fluctuations, placing emphasis on hiring frictions interacting with price frictions. This mechanism generates strong propagation and amplification of all key macroeconomic variables in response to technology shocks and mutes the traditional transmission of monetary policy shocks. A local projection analysis of aggregate U.S. data shows that the empirical results, including the cyclicality of markups, are consistent with the model's impulse response functions.