TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ilut, Cosmin
AU  - Kehrig, Matthias
AU  - Schneider, Martin
TI  - Slow to Hire, Quick to Fire: Employment Dynamics with Asymmetric Responses to News
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 20473
PY  - 2014
Y2  - September 2014
DO  - 10.3386/w20473
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20473
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w20473.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Cosmin L. Ilut
Department of Economics
Duke University
223 Social Sciences Building
Box 90097
Durham, NC 27708
Tel: 919/660-1844
E-Mail: cosmin.ilut@duke.edu

Matthias Kehrig
Department of Economics
Duke University
237 Social Sciences, Box 90097
Durham, NC 27708
Tel: 919/660-1901
E-Mail: matthias.kehrig@duke.edu

Martin Schneider
Department of Economics
Stanford University
579 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: (650) 721 6320
E-Mail: schneidr@stanford.edu
AB  - Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified 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 levels 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.
ER  -