Job Destruction Research Articles

Meeting the Challenge of Unemployment?

South Africa has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the world. Job creation is a national priority, yet labor-intensive options are derided by the trade union movement as an unacceptable throwback to the “cheap labor” policies of apartheid, and effectively ruled out by the government in its recent National Development Plan (NDP). Instead, minimum-wage setting in South Africa continues to contribute to job destruction (as evidenced most recently in the clothing industry). Policy-makers hope that support for high-productivity firms and rapid economic growth will make up for job losses and solve the unemployment problem. Unfortunately, South Africa’s economic performance has been comparatively disappointing and constrained by negative investor sentiment, especially with regard to the labor market. The NDP has called for a social accord between labor and capital. But the prospects are not promising, and unemployment is likely to remain a significant feature of the South African economic landscape.

Firm-Specific Exchange Rate Exposure and Employment Adjustment: Evidence from China

This paper investigates how exchange rate fluctuations affect employment using Chinese firm-level data with information on exports by destination and imports by source country. Unlike previous studies, we are able to exploit both the variation of trading partner distributions and the variation of export and import intensity at the firm level. We use these to identify the impact of exchange rate movements. We incorporate these elements into a theory-consistent firm-specific exchange rate exposure and relate it to firm employment changes. We find that incorporating firm trading partner distributions is important to consistently and precisely estimate the employment impact of exchange rate movements. Regression results suggest a significant but modest exchange rate effect on employment. The effect varies substantially across firms. In addition, job creation is more responsive than job destruction.

Dynamics of Firm-level Job Flows in Slovenia, 1996–2011

Firm-level employment changes were associated with simultaneous high rates of gross job creation, destruction, and reallocation. These job flows primarily reflected persistent firm-level employment changes. There was considerable variation in job flow rates across sectors. Sectors that created more jobs also destroyed more jobs. Job destruction was more volatile than job creation. Relative volatility was negatively related to net employment growth. Sectoral and aggregate economy-wide shocks exerted considerable influence on variations in job creation and destruction rates. However, idiosyncratic factors were also important. Passive learning about initial conditions explained a small, but significant, fraction of job reallocation.

Unemployment Insurance Experience Rating and Labor Market Dynamics

Unemployment insurance experience rating imposes higher payroll tax rates on firms that have laid off more workers in the past. To analyze the effects of UI tax policy on labor market dynamics, this paper develops a search model of unemployment with heterogeneous firms and realistic UI financing. The model predicts that higher experience rating reduces both job creation and job destruction. Using firm-level data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the model is tested by comparing job creation and job destruction across states and industries with different UI tax schedules. The empirical analysis shows a strong negative relationship between job flows and experience rating. Consistent with the empirical results, comparative steady state tax experiments show that a 5% increase in experience rating reduces job flows by an average of 1.4%. While the unemployment rate falls on average by .21 percentage points, the effect on tax revenues is ambiguous. The model has implications for UI financing reform currently being considered at the state and national level. Two alternative reforms that close half of the UI financing gap are considered: the reform that increases experience rating is shown to improve labor market outcomes. In a version of the model with aggregate shocks, higher experience rating dampens the response of layoffs and unemployment over the business cycle. Experience rating also induces nonlinear responses of unemployment to proportionally larger shocks as well as asymmetry in response to booms and busts.

Trade Costs and Job Flows: Evidence from Establishment-Level Data

We present evidence of the impact of input and output trade liberalization on establishment-level job flows. Using a longitudinal database containing the universe of manufacturing establishments in California from 1992 to 2004, we find that a decline in input or output trade costs causes job destruction in the least productive establishments, job creation in the most productive establishments, and an increase in the death likelihood of the least productive establishments. The evidence is consistent with predictions of models of trade with heterogeneous firms. We also show that input trade liberalization has larger effects on establishment-level job flows than output trade liberalization.

Age and Skill Bias of Trade Liberalisation? Heterogeneous Employment Effects of EU Eastern Enlargement

This study analyses the 2004 Eastern Enlargement to the European Union to obtain evidence on the employment effects of an increase in trade liberalisation. The Enlargement is thought to generate a trade-induced demand shock with no (or only limited) supply effects. Besides the variation over time induced by the Enlargement, identification of the effects is based on a Melitz (2003) type productivity term to differentiate firms by the extent of exposure to the demand shock. The idea is that the effects of the demand shock should be driven by differences in firm-level productivity from the period before the new member countries actually entered the EU. German linked employer-employee data allow to observe the relation of initial establishment productivity with employment changes over a long panel from 1995 to 2009. The estimates show that the Enlargement had a negative effect on establishment-level employment growth, which is driven by increased worker separations and increased job destruction. Besides the overall employment effect, the study focuses on effect heterogeneity across age and skill groups of the workforce. These estimates point to a skill bias in the effect of the Enlargement that disadvantages low- and medium-skilled workers in terms of higher worker separation and job destruction. In addition, lowskilled workers suffer fewer accessions by firms, where against medium-skilled workers enjoy increased accessions and creation of new jobs. Besides this indication for a skill bias, there are no clear indications that point to an age bias in the employment effect of the Eastern Enlargement.

Job destruction in Newcastle: minimum wage-setting and low-wage employment in the South African clothing industry

From its establishment in 2002, the National Bargaining Council for the Clothing Manufacturing Industry (NBC) was used by the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union (SACTWU) and mostly Cape Town-based employers to raise wages in lower-wage areas, including Newcastle. Rising minimum wages were agreed in the NBC, and then extended countrywide by the Minister of Labour. In Newcastle (and elsewhere), major firms shut down, whilst others failed to comply fully with the repeatedly raised minimum wages and levies imposed by the NBC. In 2010, the NBC launched a new ‘compliance drive’, using the labour courts to put pressure on, and close down, non-compliant firms, threatening at least 20,000 jobs. The NBC also agreed further wage increases, and presented these to the Minister of Labour for extension countrywide. Newcastle employers responded by taking legal action against the Minister of Labour and the NBC. The struggle over minimum wages in areas like Newcastle is of broader importance because the non-compliant firms comprised the labour-intensive rump of the last remaining labour-intensive manufacturing sector in South Africa. The Newcastle crisis reveals starkly the tensions between labour market policies and institutions and employment. The Newcastle case shows how, under the guise of promoting ‘decent work’ for workers and the supposed levelling of the playing field for producers, an unholy coalition of a trade union, some employers and the state initiated and drove a process of structural adjustment that undermined labour-intensive employment and exported South African jobs to lower-wage countries such as Lesotho and China.

News and Labour Market Dynamics in the Data and in Matching Models

This paper uses a vector autoregression model estimated with Bayesian methods to identify the effect of productivity news shocks on labour market variables by imposing that they are orthogonal to current technology but they explain future observed technology. In the aftermath of a positive news shock, unemployment falls, whereas wages and the job finding rate increase. The analysis establishes that news shocks are important in explaining the historical developments in labour market variables, whereas they play a minor role for movements in real activity. We show that the empirical responses to news shocks are in line with those of a baseline search and matching model of the labour market and that the job destruction rate and real wage rigidities are critical for the variables’ responses to the news shock.

Financial Shocks and Labor: Facts and Theories

The global financial recession of 2008–9 as well as historical precedents with financial crises suggest that financial shocks do translate into the labor markets. This paper first documents that financial recessions are different from other recessions in terms of their labor market impact, as they involve a larger employment/unemployment response conditioning on output. Second, it surveys the various mechanisms linking financial shocks to employment adjustment, developing a new theory of the effects of leverage on job creation and destruction. Third, it presents evidence coherent with one of such mechanisms, notably with the prediction that more leveraged firms experience larger job destruction during financial recessions, controlling for the scale of output falls.

A search model with endogenous job destruction and discrimination: Why equal wage policies may not eliminate wage disparity

This paper extends the search with discrimination framework by introducing jobs that are constrained by equal wage policies, and endogenous job destruction that creates Becker-like competitive pressure on prejudiced firms. The model predicts a number of stylized facts observed in the U.S. labor market, including persistent aggregate wage inequality, prevalent within-firm wage equality, overlapping wage distributions for different worker types, and some, but imperfect, job sorting/segregation. Numeric simulations are offered to illustrate some of the model's predictions. These include a counterintuitive relationship between wage inequality and equal wage policies that can arise in special cases: under specific assumptions equal wage policies can actually increase the steady-state level of market discrimination. I discuss this result's implication that different policies may be optimal to combat discrimination based on race versus discrimination based on gender, though this finding may be of limited practical importance.

Does the growth process discriminate against older workers?

This paper seeks to gain insights on the relationship between growth and employment when considering heterogeneous agents in terms of their working horizon. Using an OECD database, our empirical estimations suggest that growth positively influences the employment rate of workers having a long working horizon (young workers) while negatively influences the employment rate of workers having a short working horizon (senior workers). We then provide theoretical foundations to this result by means of an endogenous job destruction framework à laMortensen and Pissarides (1998) where we introduce life cycle features. We show that, under the assumption of homogeneous productivity among workers, growth negatively affects the employment rate of workers having a short working horizon before retirement (senior workers) while it positively affects the employment rate of workers having a long working horizon (young workers). Numerical simulations confirm these results, however a non-standard calibration is required to reproduce the elasticity values obtained in our empirical estimations.

Catastrophic job Destruction during the Portuguese Economic Crisis

In this article we study the resilience of the Portuguese labor market, in terms of job flows, employment and wage developments, in the context of the current recession. We single out the huge contribution of job destruction, especially due to the closing of existing firms, to the dramatic decline of total employment and increase of the unemployment rate. We also document the very large increase in the incidence of minimum wage earners and nominal wage freezes. We explore three different channels that may have amplified the employment response to the great recession: the credit channel, the wage rigidity channel, and the labor market segmentation channel. We uncover what we believe is convincing evidence that the severity of credit constraints played a significant role in the current job destruction process. Wage rigidity is seen to be associated with lower net job creation and higher failure rates of firms. Finally, labor market segmentation seems to have favored a stronger job destruction that was facilitated by an increasing number of temporary workers.

Comment on “Catastrophic job Destruction during the Portuguese Economic Crisis”

This comment discusses the paper “Catastrophic Job Destruction” by Anabela Carneiro, Pedro Portugal and José Varejão, which was presented at the Bank of Greece Conference in May 2013.

Temporary Contracts, Employment Protection, and Collective Bargaining

AbstractThis paper examines the effect of employment protection in a matching model with endogenous job destruction, collective bargaining, and two types of employment contracts. Using this framework, we show that (i) the impact on job creation and job destruction caused by reducing the firing costs associated with temporary jobs depends on the labour unions' bargaining strength and the gap in firing costs between contracts; (ii) reducing the firing costs associated with permanent jobs unambiguously decreases equilibrium unemployment if labour unions have strong bargaining power; and (iii) the impact caused by the firing costs differs between collective and individual bargaining.

The recent decline in employment dynamics

Abstract We document and attempt to explain the recent decline in employment dynamics in the U.S. We have four major empirical findings. First, each measure exhibits a “stair step” pattern, with the declines concentrated in recessions and little increase during subsequent expansions. Second, changes in the composition of workers and businesses can explain only a small amount of the decline. Third, any explanation for the decline in job creation and job destruction will account for no more than one-third of the decline in hires and separations. Fourth, the decline in hires and separations is driven by the disappearance of short-duration jobs. JEL Codes E24, J63

Outsourcing, Occupational Restructuring, and Employee Well‐Being: Is There a Silver Lining?

This study examines the relationship between outsourcing and various aspects of employee well‐being by devoting special attention to the role of occupational restructuring as a conveying mechanism. Using linked employer–employee data, we find that offshoring involves job destruction, especially when the destination is a low‐wage country. In such circumstances, staying employees’ job satisfaction is reduced. However, the relationship between outsourcing and employee well‐being is not entirely negative. Our evidence also shows that offshoring to high‐wage countries stimulates the vertical mobility of employees in affected firms in a manner that improves perceived well‐being, particularly in terms of better prospects for promotion.

Labor-market volatility in a matching model with worker heterogeneity and endogenous separations

This paper shows that introducing worker heterogeneity into a standard search and matching model can help increase the volatility of unemployment without violating the tight negative correlation between vacancies and unemployment, i.e., the Beveridge curve. In the model, periods of high job destruction and unemployment correspond with periods of more severe mismatch between the demands of firms and the qualifications of job seekers. A more severe mismatch translates into fewer successful employment matches conditional on the number of contacts per firm and, as a result, into a higher expected recruitment cost per worker hired, with adverse effects on incentives to open vacancies.

The impact of employment protection legislation on labour productivity in a general equilibrium matching model

Abstract The standard analysis of the impact of EPL on labour market outcomes concentrates mainly on unemployment and job flows, disregarding possible effects on labour productivity. In this paper we make (a component of) labour productivity endogenous and analyze how the presence of a stringent protection legislation affects labour market in an equilibrium matching model with endogenous job destruction. In particular, in our study we imagine that an employed worker has to exert effort to produce and this generates disutility. Therefore, in this framework high labour productivity on one hand is costly for a worker in terms of disutility, and on the other hand might be beneficial in terms of lower job destruction. We find that high firing costs partially substitute high labour productivity in reducing job destruction and this, consequently, brings down the optimal level of productivity. Furthermore, the impact of EPL on unemployment is ambiguous but numerical exercises show unambiguously how higher firing restrictions reduce different measures of aggregate welfare. To some extent, the clear emergence of these results leads to interesting policy implications and, indeed, rationalizes the recent empirical evidence on the impact of EPL.

Opening Clauses in Collective Bargaining Agreements: More Flexibility to Save Jobs?

Abstract This paper analyses the impact of opening clauses in German collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) on job flows. Opening clauses should provide firms with more flexibility in economic crises. Therefore, firms operating under a CBA with opening clauses are expected to have lower job turnover, in particular lower job destruction under bad business conditions, and - if job creation is not adversely affected - higher job growth. We analyse this question empirically using data from the IAB Establishment Panel, a large and representative data set on German establishments. We supplement the data with additional information on the existence of opening clauses in CBAs in the West German manufacturing sector (using the IAW Data Set on Opening Clauses). By means of a matching approach, we address selection problems in flexible CBAs and reveal that the existence of opening clauses has a positive, albeit not always significant, effect on job growth. In contrast, there are no significant effects on job destruction and job creation per se, and, based on information given in the IAB Establishment Panel itself, explicit knowledge of opening clauses or their application have no additional effect on job flows.

How Dynamic is the Private Sector? Job Creation and Insights from Workplace-Level Data

Private sector employment rose by over a million in the past three years. Commentators often interpret this number – which is a net figure – as ‘job creation’. But how many jobs really are created each year, and conversely how many are lost? How has this changed with the downturn and what does it imply for the recovery?This article uses findings from business and workplace-level data to map i) job creation and destruction over recent years, ii) its components in accounting terms, iii) the relative contribution by firms of different size and age, and iv) the reallocation of resource between firms and to workplaces within firms. There are four main points: a)Job churn far outweighs net change. Before the downturn, an average of 4.0 million jobs were created each year and a slightly smaller number lost (3.7m), resulting in a net increase of about 300,000 per year.b)Most job creation (over 70 per cent) is within existing firms; but within that, over a third comes from the creation of new workplaces set up within those firms.c)The net reduction in jobs in 2008–11 was not, in contrast to earlier recessions, due to higher rates of job loss; instead it reflects a sustained period of lower job creation in new workplaces, especially in SMEs (figure 1). This is consistent with ongoing credit constraints hitting SMEs particularly hard, as discussed in Armstrong et al. (2013), or could simply be in line with lack of confidence to invest at this time.d)Looking at the years 2008–11 individually, the downturn begins with reduced levels of entry, followed by a peak of job destruction in 2009 in line with reduced aggregate demand, and then a continuation of low levels of entry of new SMEs, and lower levels of destruction too (figure 2).