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Idiosyncratic Risk and Aggregate Employment Dynamics

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Author Info
Jeffrey R. Campbell
Jonas D.M.Fisher

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Abstract

This paper studies how producers' idiosyncratic risks affect an industry's aggregate dynamics in an environment where certainty equivalence fails. In the model, producers can place workers in two types of jobs, organized and temporary. Workers are less productive in temporary jobs, but creating an organized job requires an irreversible investment of managerial resources. Increasing productivity risk raises the value of an unexercised option to create an organized job. Losing this option is one cost of immediate organized job creation, so an increase in its value induces substitution towards cheaper temporary jobs. Because they are costless to create and destroy, a producer using temporary jobs can be more flexible, responding more to both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks. If all of an industry's producers adapt to heightened idiosyncratic risk in this way, the industry as a whole can respond more to a given aggregate shock. This insight is used to better understand the observation from the U.S. manufacturing sector that groups of plants displaying high idiosyncratic variability also have large aggregate fluctuations.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 7936.

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Date of creation: Oct 2000
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7936

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E00 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - General
L00 - Industrial Organization - - General - - - General

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Min Ouyang, 2005. "The Scarring Effect of Recessions," Working Papers 050609, University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  2. Øivind A. Nilsen, Arvid Raknerud, Marina Rybalka and Terje Skjerpen, 2005. "Lumpy Investments, Factor Adjustments and Productivity," Discussion Papers 441, Research Department of Statistics Norway. [Downloadable!]
  3. Min Ouyang, 2006. "Plant Life Cycle and Aggregate Employment Dynamics," Working Papers 050632, University of California-Irvine, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  4. Eugenio P. Pinto, 2009. "Firms' relative sensitivity to aggregate shocks and the dynamics of gross job flows," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2009-02, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  5. Simon Gilchrist & John C. Williams, 2005. "Investment, Capacity, and Uncertainty: A Putty-Clay Approach," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 8(1), pages 1-27, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  6. Jeffrey R. Campbell & Zvi Hercowitz, 2005. "The Role of Collateralized Household Debt in Macroeconomic Stabilization," NBER Working Papers 11330, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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