Marcelo Veracierto

Plant level irreversible investment and equilibrium business cycles

This paper evaluates the importance of microeconomic irreversibilities for aggregate dynamics using a general equilibrium approach. To this end a real business cycle model of establishment level dynamics is formulated and analyzed. Investments decisions are subject to irreversibility constraints and consequently, are of the (S,s) variety. This complicates the analysis since the state of the economy is described by an endogenous distribution of agents. The paper develops a computational strategy that makes this class of (S,s) economies fully tractable. Contrary to what the previous literature has suggested, investment irreversibilities are found to have no effects on aggregate business cycle dynamics.

Severance payments in an economy with frictions

Abstract We construct a general equilibrium model to evaluate the quantitative effects of severance payments in the presence of contractual and reallocational frictions. Key elements of the model are establishment level dynamics, imperfect insurance markets, and variable search decisions. In contrast to previous studies that analyzed severance payments in frictionless environments, we find that severance payments can have large positive effects on employment and welfare. This result is a consequence of search being costly and of wage contracts being rigid. Moreover, we find that the firing penalty role of severance payments is much more important than their insurance role.

Labor-Market Policies in an Equilibrium Search Model

We explore to what extent differences in employment and unemployment across economies can be generated by differences in labor-market policies. We use a version of the Lucas-Prescott equilibrium search model with undirected search and endogenous labor-force participation. Minimum wages, degree of unionization, firing taxes, and unemployment benefits are introduced and their effects analyzed. When the model is calibrated to U.S. observations, it reproduces several of the elasticities of employment and unemployment with respect to changes in policies reported in the empirical literature. We find that: (1) minimum wages have small effects; (2) firing taxes have similar effects to those found in frictionless general equilibrium models; (3) unions have large and negative effects on employment, unemployment, and welfare; and (4) unemployment benefits substantially increase unemployment and reduce welfare.

Firing Costs and Business Cycle Fluctuations

This paper evaluates to what extent the introduction of firing costs can affect the aggregate dynamics of a neoclassical growth model with heterogeneous establishments. Similarly to the previous literature, firing costs are found to have large steady-state effects. However, they have no important effects on business cycle dynamics: Aggregate employment fluctuations are somewhat smaller when the firing costs are introduced, but most of the effects turn out to be insignificant

Employment Flows, Capital Mobility, and Policy Analysis

This paper extends Hopenhayn and Rogersons analysis of firing taxes by introducing a flexible form of capital and considering transitionary dynamics. The paper finds that capital is not important for understanding the long run and welfare effects of firing taxes. However, capital is crucial for determining the short run consequences of eliminating this type of policy.

On the cyclical behavior of employment, unemployment and labor force participation

In this paper I evaluate to what extent a real business cycle (RBC) model that incorporates search and leisure decisions can simultaneously account for the observed behavior of employment, unemployment and out-of-the-labor-force. This contrasts with the previous RBC literature, which analyzed employment or hours fluctuations by either lumping together unemployment and out-of-the-labor-force into a single non-employment state or assuming a fixed labor force participation. Once the three employment states are explicitly introduced I find that the RBC model generates highly counterfactual labor market dynamics.

The Role of Housing in Labor Reallocation

This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to analyze the role of local housing markets and moving costs in determining the character and extent of labor reallocation in the US economy. Labor reallocation in the model is driven by idiosyncratic city-specific productivity shocks, which we measure using a dataset that we compile using more than 350 U.S. cities for the years 1984 to 2008. Based on this measurement, we find that our model is broadly consistent with the city-level evidence on net and gross population flows, employment, wages and residential investment. We also find that the location-specific nature of housing is more important than moving costs in determining labor reallocation. Absent this quasi-fixity of housing, and under various assumptions governing population flows, population and employment would be much more volatile than observed.

Establishments Dynamics and Matching Frictions in Classical Competitive Equilibrium

This paper develops a Walrasian equilibrium theory of establishment level dynamics and matching frictions and uses it to evaluate the effects of congestion externalities in the matching process and determine the government interventions that are needed to implement a Pareto optimal allocation. The optimal policy, which involves a tax on the creation of help-wanted ads and an unemployment subsidy, is highly contractionary. However, it leads to large welfare gains. The policy also plays an important role in dampening the response of the economy to aggregate productivity shocks.

Gross Migration, Housing and Urban Population Dynamics

Cities experience significant, near random walk productivity shocks, yet population is slow to adjust. In practice local population changes are dominated by variation in net migration, and we argue that understanding gross migration is essential to quantify how net migration may slow population adjustments. Housing is also a natural candidate for slowing population adjustments because it is dicult to move, costly to build quickly, and a large durable stock makes a city attractive to potential migrants. We quantify the influence of migration and housing on urban population dynamics using a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities which incorporates a new theory of gross migration motivated by patterns we uncover in a panel of US cities. After assigning values to the models parameters with an exactly identified procedure, we demonstrate that its implied dynamic responses to productivity shocks of population, gross migration, employment, wages, home construction and house prices strongly resemble those we estimate with our panel data. The empirically validated model implies that costs of attracting workers to cities drive slow population adjustments. Housing plays a very limited role.

What are the Short-Run Effects of Increasing Labor Market Flexibility?

This paper evaluates the short-run effects of introducing labor market flexibility to an economy characterized by large firing taxes. Different reforms are considered: 1) eliminating all firing taxes, 2) introducing flexible new contracts while retaining the firing taxes on workers employed previous to the reform, and 3) introducing temporary contracts. The paper finds that eliminating all firing taxes increases the unemployment rate much more in the short run than in the long run, that introducing new flexible contracts has similar effects as eliminating all firing taxes, and that introducing temporary contracts of short durations can decrease the unemployment rate, but only in the short-run.