Draft coming soon!
Using comprehensive Finnish employer–employee register data, I document that furlough use is highly concentrated across firms: most firms never furlough workers, and firm fixed effects explain several times more variation in furlough rates than industry and year effects. Moreover, past furlough use strongly predicts future furlough use. I develop a firm dynamics model that explains the persistence through learning and use it to discipline a quantitative analysis of furlough policy. The cost structure makes the choice between furloughs and layoffs depend on the persistence of the underlying shock and the policy know-how. I calibrate the model to the Finnish data and find that the learning channel explains the empirical patterns, while in a counterfactual analysis furloughs are more evenly distributed across firms.
The Unequal Transmission of Firm Shocks to Wages with Elias Einiö
We assess which worker groups gain from firm shocks and which lose by employing rich linked employer-employee data, a comprehensive wage survey, and firms' financial statements spanning over two decades. We show that: (i) men's wages respond almost twice as strongly as women's to firm growth, while responses are weak for negative shocks in both groups; (ii) the wage gap induced by unequal pass-through is amplified among parents of young children; and (iii) collective bargaining attenuates pass-through. These findings imply that firm-level wage dynamics are a significant source of long-run gender wage inequality in growing economies.
Founder Diversity and Start-up Performance with Erkka Posti
Lomautusjärjestelmän toimivuus ja mahdolliset kehityskohteet with Juho Alasalmi, Henna Busk, Mats Godenhielm, Minna Mayer, Eero Mäkynen, Niku Määttänen, Olli Oosi and Oskari Vähämaa. Prime Minister's Office Policy Brief 2024:17. 8/2024. Found here.