The Concentration of Job Destruction

Robert Hall ()

No 7025, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: A time series is concentrated if the expectation of its current value is a negative function of a moving average of past values up to all but the most recent past. Job destruction has the property of concentration in a model of heterogeneous jobs because an adverse shock destroys jobs in plants close to the margin of shutdown. Until other plants drift close to that margin, there are fewer plants that are vulnerable to another adverse shock. Concentration is easy to spot in the autocorrelations of a time series, which will be negative except for the first few lags. A simple model generates data displaying concentration. Data on job destruction and employment change for U.S. manufacturing show unambiguous evidence of concentration. According to the simple model, job creation is more persistent and thus less concentrated than is destruction, a property reflected in the data as well.

JEL-codes: E24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
Date: 1999-03
Note: EFG
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7025.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7025

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7025
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().