Essays in macroeconomics, corporate finance and labor economics

labor rigidities;financial frictions;credit shocks;human capital;leverage;scarring effect

Acabbi, Edoardo Maria ; Chodorow-Reich, Gabriel I.,Farhi, Emmanuel,Hanson, Samuel G.,Stein, Jeremy

University:Havard University

Department:Economics

关键词: labor rigidities;    financial frictions;    credit shocks;    human capital;    leverage;    scarring effect;   

Others  :  https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37365740/ACABBI-DISSERTATION-2020.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation is composed of three essays on macroeconomics, corporate finance and labor economics. The first investigates how rigidities in labor adjustment affect the propagation of credit shocks to firms. The second examines how the interaction between financial frictions and labor rigidities impacts firms’ productivity and determines a non-cleansing effect of financial shocks for the economy. The last investigates the long-lasting effect of business cycle shocks on economywide activity andhuman capital accumulation among workers.In the first essay, completed jointly with Ettore Panetti and Alessandro Sforza, we investigate how rigidities in labor adjustment at the firm level constrain firms’ use of internal funds. In this way, these rigidities become a relevant source of liquidity risk for firms. We conduct an event study of the interbank market freeze at the end of 2008 by matching administrative data from Portugal on workers, firms, banks and credit relationships. We document that labor rigidities amplify the effects of a shock to short-term credit on employment, asset growth and firm survival. Findings are driven by the interaction of the credit shock with rigidities in labor costs adjustment and workers’ imperfect substitutability through human capital.The second essay, also completed jointly with Ettore Panetti and Alessandro Sforza, complements the first essay. We show that the interaction of labor rigidities with the 2008 credit shock in Portugal has a non-cleansing effect on aggregate productivity in the economy. The credit shock contributes to the decrease in aggregate productivity following the 2008 Financial Crisis, particularly through labor misallocation.In the third essay, written with Andrea Alati and Luca Mazzone, we characterize the cyclical behavior of worker-firm matches and the process of on-the-job human capital accumulation in a structural search model of the labor market. The model features both worker and firm heterogeneity and life-cycle dynamics. We use the model to study the long-lasting effects of recessions economywide and on workers’ careers. Additionally, we analyze the optimal provision of workers’ insurance within the firm through an optimal dynamic contract, which endogenously generates downward rigidity in compensation.