Défaillances d’entreprises et destructions d’emplois. Une estimation de la relation sur données macro-sectorielles

In this article, we propose an estimate of the elasticity of employment to business failures by enriching the traditional labour demand equations with business start-ups and business failures. It emerges from this work that, after controlling for the direct effect of the macroeconomic crisis on employment, business failures have a significant impact on job destruction: when the elasticity of employment to business failures is constrained to be identical in all branches, this turns out to be significant, with the sign expected and amounting to -0.3. This result corroborates the observation made by Banerjee et al. (2020b) according to which the labour market would be more affected when the crisis is accompanied by business failures of a similar magnitude. Moreover, this effect is different depending on which branch the company belongs to. Thus, when the sectoral estimate of this elasticity is left free, a strong heterogeneity appears, varying from -0.8 for the business services sector to an insignificant effect for the financial services sector. However, as is underlined by a large number of studies, this health crisis is having a heterogeneous impact on the different sectors of the economy and, consequently, the concentration of bankruptcies in the sectors hit hardest could have significant consequences on the job market. Using the sectoral results based on French data on the increase in business failures following the health crisis proposed by Guérini et al. (2020) and by Sampognaro (2020), we propose an assessment of job losses due to these business failures. According to our estimates, some 175,000 salaried jobs were destroyed due to business failures linked to the Covid-19 crisis in 2021, nearly 40% of which were in the business services sector alone.