Firing the wrong workers: Financing constraints and labor misallocation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Caggese, Andrea; Cunat, Vicente; Metzger, Daniel
• 署名单位: Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI); Pompeu Fabra University; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Stockholm School of Economics
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-405X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2017.10.008
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 589-607
• 关键词: Labor misallocation; Firing decisions; financing constraints

摘要

Firms consider wages, current and expected productivity, as well as firing and hiring costs when firing a worker. Financing constraints distort this intertemporal trade-off, leading firms to sub-optimally fire short-tenured workers with high future expected productivity. We provide empirical evidence of this distortion using matched employer-employee data from the Swedish population between 2000 and 2010. We propose a new empirical strategy that uses credit ratings to identify financing constraints and uses exchange rates and trade data to identify demand shocks. Our empirical results identify an important new misallocation effect of financial frictions that operates within firms across different types of workers. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.