IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fednsr/97288.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D

Author

Listed:
  • Justin Bloesch
  • Jacob P. Weber

Abstract

R&D investment spending exhibits a delayed and hump-shaped response to shocks. We show in a simple partial equilibrium model that rapidly adjusting R&D investment is costly if the probability of converting new hires into productive R&D workers (“onboarding”) is decreasing in the number of new hires (“congestion”). Congestion thus causes R&D-producing firms to slowly hire new workers in response to good shocks and hoard workers in response to bad shocks, providing a microfoundation for convex adjustment costs in R&D investment. Using novel, high-frequency productivity data on individual software developers collected from GitHub, a popular online collaboration platform, we provide quantitative evidence for such congestion. Calibrated to this evidence, a sticky-wage new Keynesian model with heterogeneous investment-producing firms subject to congestion in onboarding and no other frictions yields hump-shaped responses of R&D investment to shocks.

Suggested Citation

  • Justin Bloesch & Jacob P. Weber, 2023. "Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D," Staff Reports 1075, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednsr:97288
    DOI: 10.59576/sr.1075
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr1075.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr1075.html
    File Function: Summary
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.59576/sr.1075?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Moritz Goldbeck, 2023. "Bit by Bit: Colocation and the Death of Distance in Software Developer Networks," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 422, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    2. Felix Holub & Beate Thies, 2023. "Air Quality, High-Skilled Worker Productivity And Adaptation: Evidence From Github," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2023_402, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. David H. Kreitmeir & Paul A. Raschky, 2023. "The Unintended Consequences of Censoring Digital Technology - Evidence from Italy's ChatGPT Ban," SoDa Laboratories Working Paper Series 2023-01, Monash University, SoDa Laboratories.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    intangibles; monetary policy; R&D; innovation; team specific capital; labor adjustment costs;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E22 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Investment; Capital; Intangible Capital; Capacity
    • O36 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Open Innovation

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fednsr:97288. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gabriella Bucciarelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbnyus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.