讲座主题

Employment Decline during the Great Recession: The Role of Firm Size   Distribution

现场负责人

邓建鹏

联系电话

65907206

举办时间

1月17日14：00-15：30

举办地点

中欧平台武东路校区526

活动参与人数规模

15

联络人及联系电话

刘益如

65907868

主讲人姓名、单位、职称/职务及简历

Wenjian   Xu, University of Michigan, Ph.D. candidate

讲座内容摘要（会议议程）

Over 8 million jobs were lost in the Great Recession,   creating widespread economic hardship. This paper documents a novel and   robust empirical regularity, that highly concentrated local labor markets   experienced larger employment declines during the Great Recession. I provide   an explanation using a model with heterogeneous firms where recessions arise   as an aggregate consequence of idiosyncratic firm shocks. My model predicts a   larger decline in expected employment when the market has a higher initial   concentration level. The key idea is that relatively small firms are unable   to absorb the large number of workers that get displaced when relatively big   firms are hit by idiosyncratic shocks, as the absorption is limited by   decreasing returns to scale (at the firm) and an upward-sloping labor supply   (in the local labor market). I undertake a series of empirical tests to rule   out alternative explanations, and show that large employment losses in   concentrated labor markets are not driven by highly concentrated   industry-locations being hit harder during the Great Recession, having   thinner labor markets, having more large firms, or having high firm leverage   ratios.

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