Firing the wrong workers: Financing constraints and labor misallocation

Andrea Caggese, Vicente Cuñat and Daniel Metzger

Journal of Financial Economics, 2019, vol. 133, issue 3, 589-607

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: Labor misallocation; Firing decisions; Financing constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G32 J21 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (75)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Firing the wrong workers: financing constraints and labor misallocation (2018)
Working Paper: Firing the Wrong Workers: Financing Constraints and Labor Misallocation (2017)
Working Paper: Firing the wrong workers: Financing constraints and labor misallocation (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:133:y:2019:i:3:p:589-607

DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2017.10.008

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