Employment and Firm Heterogeneity, Capital Allocation, and Countercyclical Labor Market Policies

Brendan Epstein and Alan Finkelstein Shapiro

No 1115, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: Many countries have large employment shares in micro and small firms that have limited access to formal financing and therefore rely on input credit. Such countries are mainly emerging and developing economies, whose business cycle dynamics are increasingly important for the global economy in light of the dramatic rise in international linkages and spillovers that have occurred over the last several decades. Emerging and developing economies implemented a host of countercyclical labor market policies amid the global financial crisis, but data limitations on high-frequency labor and job flows prevent a detailed empirical assessment of the effectiveness of these policies. To address this problem, we develop a business cycle model with frictional labor markets that is novel in light of its consistency with the employment and firm structure of emerging and developing economies. We use the model to assess the aggregate impact of key countercyclical labor market policies. We find that hiring subsidies and job intermediation services for large firms are particularly effective in aiding recoveries. Policies targeting smaller firms yield limited aggregate benefits and may even be detrimental to the recovery process. The labor market structure shapes sectoral allocation and explains the economy's differential response to policy.

Keywords: Business cycles; search frictions; fiscal policy; self employment; small firms; input credit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E32 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 pages
Date: 2014-08-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-iue and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2014/1115/ifdp1115.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Employment and firm heterogeneity, capital allocation, and countercyclical labor market policies (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgif:1115

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().