Firing the Wrong Workers: Financing Constraints and Labor Misallocation

Daniel Metzger, Vicente Cuñat and Andrea Caggese
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto

No 1058, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Financing constraints; labor misallocation; firing decisions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G32 J21 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol, nep-ppm, nep-tre and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1058

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