Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'shock'
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Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 18
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Working PaperThe Effect of Oil News Shocks on Job Creation and Destruction
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-06
Using data from the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) and the Census of Manufacturing (CMF), we construct quarterly measures of job creation and destruction by 3-digit NAICS industries spanning from 1980Q3-2016Q4. These long series allow us to address three questions regarding the effect of oil news shocks. What is the average effect of oil news shocks on sectoral labor reallocation? What characteristics explain the observed heterogeneity in the average responses across industries? Has the response of US manufacturing changed over time? We find evidence that oil news shocks exert only a moderate effect on total manufacturing net employment growth but lead to a significant increase in job reallocation. However, we find a high degree of heterogeneity in responses across industries. We then show that the cross-industry variation in the sensitivity of net employment growth and excess job reallocation to oil news shocks is related to differences in energy costs, the rate of energy to capital expenditures, and the share of mature firms in the industry. Finally, we illustrate how the dynamic response of sectoral job creation and destruction to oil news shocks has declined since the mid-2000s.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperContrasting the Local and National Demographic Incidence of Local Labor Demand Shocks
July 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-36
This paper examines how spatial frictions that differ among heterogeneous workers and establishments shape the geographic and demographic incidence of alternative local labor demand shocks, with implications for the appropriate level of government at which to fund local economic initiatives. LEHD data featuring millions of job transitions facilitate estimation of a rich two-sided labor market assignment model. The model generates simulated forecasts of many alternative local demand shocks featuring different establishment compositions and local areas. Workers within 10 miles receive only 11.2% (6.6%) of nationwide welfare (employment) short-run gains, with at least 35.9% (62.0%) accruing to out-of-state workers, despite much larger per-worker impacts for the closest workers. Local incidence by demographic category is very sensitive to shock composition, but different shocks produce similar demographic incidence farther from the shock. Furthermore, the remaining heterogeneity in incidence at the state or national level can reverse patterns of heterogeneous demographic impacts at the local level. Overall, the results suggest that reduced-form approaches using distant locations as controls can produce accurate estimates of local shock impacts on local workers, but that the distribution of local impacts badly approximates shocks' statewide or national incidence.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAfter the Storm: How Emergency Liquidity Helps Small Businesses Following Natural Disasters
April 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-20
Does emergency credit prevent long-term financial distress? We study the causal effects of government-provided recovery loans to small businesses following natural disasters. The rapid financial injection might enable viable firms to survive and grow or might hobble precarious firms with more risk and interest obligations. We show that the loans reduce exit and bankruptcy, increase employment and revenue, unlock private credit, and reduce delinquency. These effects, especially the crowding-in of private credit, appear to reflect resolving uncertainty about repair. We do not find capital reallocation away from neighboring firms and see some evidence of positive spillovers on local entry.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCompositional Nature of Firm Growth and Aggregate Fluctuations
March 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-09
This paper studies firm dynamics over the business cycle. I present evidence from the United Kingdom that more rapidly growing firms are born in expansions than in recessions. Using administrative records from Census data, I find that this observation also holds for the last four recessions in the United States. I also present suggestive evidence that financial frictions play an important role in determining the types of firms that are born at different stages of the business cycle. I then develop a general equilibrium model in which firms choose their managers' span of control at birth. Firms that choose larger spans of control grow faster and eventually get to be larger, and in this sense have a larger target size. Financial frictions in the form of collateral constraints slow the rate at which firms reach their target size. It takes firms longer to get up to scale when collateral constraints tighten; therefore, businesses with the largest target size are affected disproportionately more. Thus, fewer entrepreneurs find it profitable to choose larger projects when financial conditions deteriorate. Using Bayesian methods, I estimate the model using micro and aggregate data from the United Kingdom. I find that financial shocks account for over 80% of fluctuations in the formation of businesses with a large target size, and TFP and labor wedge shocks account for the remaining 20%. An independently estimated version of the model with no choice over the span of control needs larger aggregate shocks in order to account for the same data series, suggesting that the intensive margin of business formation is important at business cycle frequencies. The model with the choice over the span of control generates an empirically relevant and non-targeted collapse in the right tail of the cumulative growth distribution among firms started in recessions, while the model without such a choice does not. The paper also discusses implications for micro-targeted government stimulus policies.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSmall and Large Firms Over the Business Cycle
February 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-09
Drawing on a new, con dential Census Bureau dataset of financial statements of a representative sample of 80000 manufacturing firms from 1977 to 2014, we provide new evidence on the link between size, cyclicality, and financial frictions. First, we only find evidence of lower cyclicality among the very largest firms (the top 1% by size). Second, due to high and rising concentration of sales and investment, the lower sensitivity of the top 1% firms dominates the behavior of aggregate fluctuations. Third, we show that this differential sensitivity does not appear to be driven by financial frictions. The higher sensitivity of the bottom 99% does not disappear after controlling for measures of financial strength, is not statistically significant after identified monetary policy shocks, and does not appear in debt financing flows. Evidence from 3-digit industries suggests a non-financial explanation: the largest 1% of firms are less sensitive due to a more diversified customer base.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFirm-to-Firm Relationships and Price Rigidity Theory and Evidence
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-33
Economists have long suspected that firm-to-firm relationships might increase price rigidity due to the use of explicit or implicit fixed-price contracts. Using transaction-level import data from the U.S. Census, I study the responsiveness of prices to exchange rate changes and show that prices are in fact substantially more responsive to these cost shocks in older versus newly formed relationships. Based on additional stylized facts about a relationship's life cycle and interviews I conducted with purchasing managers, I develop a model in which a buyer-seller pair subject to persistent, stochastic shocks to production costs shares profit risk under limited commitment. Once structurally estimated, the model replicates the empirical correlation between relationship age and the responsiveness of prices to shocks. My results suggest that changes to the average length of relationships in the economy - e.g., in a recession, when the share of young relationships declines - can influence price flexibility and hence the effectiveness of monetary policy.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAre firm-level idiosyncratic shocks important for U.S. aggregate volatility?
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-23
This paper quantitatively assesses whether firm-specific shocks can drive the U.S. business cycle. Firm-specific shocks to the largest firms can directly contribute to aggregate fluctuations whenever the firm size distribution is fat-tailed giving rise to the granular hypothesis. I use a novel, comprehensive data set compiled from administrative sources that contains the universe of firms and trade transactions, and find that the granular hypothesis accounts at most for 16 percent of the variation in aggregate sales growth. This is about half of that found by previous studies that imposed Gibrat's law where all firms are equally volatile regardless of their size. Using the full distribution of growth rates among U.S. firms, I find robust evidence of a negative relationship between firm-level volatility and size, i.e. the size-variance relationship. The largest firms (whose shocks drive granularity) are the least volatile under the size-variance relationship, thus their influence on aggregates is mitigated. I show that by taking this relationship into account the effect of firm-specific shocks on observed macroeconomic volatility is substantially reduced. I then investigate several plausible mechanisms that could explain the negative sizevariance relationship. After empirically ruling out some of them, I suggest a 'market power' channel in which large firms face smaller price elasticities and therefore respond less to a givensized productivity shock than small firms do. I provide direct evidence for this mechanism by estimating demand elasticities among U.S. manufactures. Lastly, I construct an analytically tractable framework that is consistent with several empirical regularities related to firm size.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperSlow to Hire, Quick to Fire: Employment Dynamics with Asymmetric Responses to News
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-15
Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a united explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro and micro data. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional 'macro' volatility and cross-sectional 'micro' volatility as well as negative skewness in the cross section and in the time series at different level of aggregation. Concave establishment level responses of employment growth to TFP shocks estimated from Census data induce significant skewness, movements in volatility and amplification of bad aggregate shocks.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperRedistribution of Local Labor Market Shocks through Firms' Internal Networks
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-03
Local labor market shocks are difficult to insure against. Using confidential micro data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database, we document that firms redistribute the employment impacts of local demand shocks across regions through their internal networks of establishments. During the Great Recession, the massive decline in house prices caused a sharp drop in consumer demand, leading to large employment losses in the non-tradable sector. Consistent with firms smoothing out the impacts of these shocks across regions, we find large elasticities of non-tradable establishment-level employment with respect to house prices in other counties in which the firm has establishments. At the same time, establishments of firms with larger regional networks exhibit lower employment elasticities with respect to local house prices in the establishment's own county. To account for general equilibrium adjustments, we aggregate non-tradable employment at the county level. Similar to what we found at the establishment level, we find that non-tradable county-level employment responds strongly to local demand shocks in other counties linked through firms' internal networks. These results are not driven by direct demand spillovers from nearby counties, common shocks to house prices, or local demand shocks affecting non-tradable employment in distant counties indirectly via the trade channel. Our results suggest that firms play an important role in the extent to which local labor market risks areshared across regions.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFirm Leverage, Consumer Demand, and Employment Losses during the Great Recession
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-01
We argue that firms' balance sheets were instrumental in the propagation of consumer demand shocks during the Great Recession. Using establishment-level data, we show that establishments of more highly levered firms exhibit a significantly larger decline in employment in response to a drop in consumer demand. These results are not driven by firms being less productive, having expanded too much prior to the Great Recession, or being generally more sensitive to fluctuations in either aggregate employment or house prices. At the county level, we find that counties with more highly levered firms experience significantly larger job losses in response to county-wide consumer demand shocks. Thus, firms' balance sheets also matter for aggregate employment. Our research suggests a possible role for employment policies that target firms directly besides conventional stimulus.View Full Paper PDF
