时间：周三 10：00-11：30

地点：北大国发院万众楼一层大教室

主讲人：许文健（上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院助理教授）

题目: Employment Decline during the Great Recession: The Role of Firm Size Distribution

报告摘要:

Over eight million jobs were lost in the Great Recession, creating widespread economic hardship. This paper documents a novel and robust empirical regularity, that highly concentrated local labor markets experienced larger employment declines during the Great Recession. I provide an explanation using a model with heterogeneous firms where recessions arise as an aggregate consequence of idiosyncratic firm shocks. My model predicts a larger decline in expected employment when the market has a higher initial concentration level. Relatively small firms are unable to absorb the large number of workers that get displaced when relatively big firms are hit by idiosyncratic shocks, as the absorption is limited by decreasing returns to scale (at the firm) and an upward-sloping labor supply (in the local labor market). I undertake a series of empirical tests to rule out alternative explanations, and show that large employment losses in concentrated labor markets are not driven by highly concentrated industry-locations being hit harder during the Great Recession, having thinner labor markets, having more large firms, or having higher firm leverage ratios.  

主讲人简介：

许文健，上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院助理教授，2014年硕士毕业于北京大学国家发展研究院，获经济学硕士学位，2020年博士毕业于美国密歇根大学，获经济学博士学位。他的研究方向为劳动经济学，公司金融以及宏观经济学，研究兴趣包括经济危机的传导，企业创立与创新，公司兼并与收购等。