Public sector employment and aggregate fluctuations
Luis G. Bettoni and
Marcelo R. Santos
Journal of Macroeconomics, 2022, vol. 72, issue C
Abstract:
An important stylized fact about public sector employment is that it predominantly hires skilled and more experienced workers. In this paper, we consider a search and matching model with public sector and on-the-job human capital accumulation that incorporates this stylized fact to study how the public sector employment affects the labor market volatility. In the model, public sector employment affects aggregate fluctuations by changing the composition of workers employed in the private sector. Because workers accumulate human capital and become more productive when employed, the flow of benefits from forming a match are spread over time. In this environment, if the flow into the public sector increases with human capital, then the government hiring policy decreases the firm’s benefit of hiring and the matching surplus, increasing the responsiveness of labor market tightness to shocks. We calibrate the model for the Brazilian economy and show that this mechanism amplifies the effects of public employment on vacancy creation and private sector employment volatility.
Keywords: Public sector employment; Aggregate fluctuations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E32 E62 J21 J45 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164070422000209
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jmacro:v:72:y:2022:i:c:s0164070422000209
DOI: 10.1016/j.jmacro.2022.103418
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Macroeconomics is currently edited by Douglas McMillin and Theodore Palivos
More articles in Journal of Macroeconomics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().