Economics Seminar(2014-31)
Topic:Capital Misallocation and Unemployment
Speaker: Feng Dong
Affiliation: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Time:Friday, 19 December. 15:00-16:30pm
Location: Room 217, Guanghua Building 2
Abstract:
The recent recession was associated not only with a marked disruption in the credit market, but also a sharp deterioration in labor market conditions, as evidenced by high unemployment rates and an outward shift in the Beveridge curve. Motivated by such co-movements of the credit market and the labor market, I develop a tractable dynamic model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, credit constraints, and labor-search frictions. In this framework, the misallocation of capital across firms has an adverse effect on the matching efficiency in the labor market. I then quantify the importance of capital misallocation for understanding the behavior of unemployment rate. I find that the credit crunch was the key driving force behind the outward shift in the Beveridge curve during and after the Great Recession. More broadly, I find that credit market frictions and labor search frictions almost equally contributed to unemployment over all business cycles between 1951 and 2011.
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