Papers by Elena Pastorino
Social Science Research Network, 2022
Recent work has demonstrated that existing solutions of the unemployment volatility puzzle are at... more Recent work has demonstrated that existing solutions of the unemployment volatility puzzle are at odds with the procylicality of the opportunity cost of employment, the cyclicality of wages, and the volatility of risk-free rates. We propose a model of business cycles that is immune to these critiques by incorporating two key features. First, we allow for preferences that generate timevarying risk over the business cycle to account for observed fluctuations in asset prices. Second, we introduce human capital acquisition consistent with the evidence on how wages grow with experience in the labor market. Our model reproduces the observed fluctuations in unemployment because hiring a worker is a risky investment with long-duration returns. As in the data, the price of risk in our model sharply increases in recessions. The benefit from hiring new workers therefore greatly declines, leading to a large decrease in job vacancies and an increase in unemployment of the same magnitude as in the data. We show that our results extend to versions of the model that include physical capital, a life cycle for workers, and alternative preference structures common in the asset-pricing literature.
Replication data for: Debt Constraints and the Labor Wedge
Staff Report, 2012
This paper develops and structurally estimates a labor market model that integrates job assignmen... more This paper develops and structurally estimates a labor market model that integrates job assignment, learning, and human capital acquisition to account for the main patterns of careers in firms. A key innovation is that the model incorporates workers' job mobility within and between firms, and the possibility that, through job assignment, firms affect the rate at which they acquire information about workers. The model is estimated using longitudinal administrative data on managers from one U.S. firm in a service industry (the data of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmström (1994a,b)) and fits the data remarkably well. The estimated model is used to assess both the direct effect of learning on wages and its indirect effect through its impact on the dynamics of job assignment. Consistent with the evidence in the literature on comparative advantage and learning, the estimated direct effect of learning on wages is found to be small. Unlike in previous work, by jointly estimating the dynamics of beliefs, jobs, and wages imposing all of the model restrictions, the impact of learning on job assignment can be uncovered and the indirect effect of learning on wages explicitly assessed. The key finding of the paper is that the indirect effect of learning on wages is substantial: overall learning accounts for one quarter of the cumulative wage growth on the job during the first seven years of tenure. Nearly all of the remaining growth is from human capital acquisition. A related novel finding is that the experimentation component of learning is a primary determinant of the timing of promotions and wage increases. Along with persistent uncertainty about ability, experimentation is responsible for substantially compressing wage growth at low tenures.
Code and data files for "On the Importance of Household versus Firm Credit Frictions in the Great Recession
Computer Codes, 2020
Working paper, Sep 25, 2020
Although a credit tightening is commonly recognized as a key determinant of the Great Recession, ... more Although a credit tightening is commonly recognized as a key determinant of the Great Recession, to date, it is unclear whether a worsening of credit conditions faced by households or by firms was most responsible for the downturn. Some studies have suggested that the household-side credit channel is quantitatively the most important one. Many others contend that the firm-side channel played a crucial role. We propose a model in which both channels are present and explicitly formalized. Our analysis indicates that the household-side credit channel is quantitatively more relevant than the firm-side credit channel. We then evaluate the relative benefits of a fixed-sized transfer to households and to firms that improves each group's access to credit. We find that the effects of such a transfer on employment are substantially larger when the transfer targets households rather than firms. Hence, we provide theoretical and quantitative support to the view that the employment decline during the Great Recession would have been less severe if instead of focusing on easing firms' access to credit, the government had expended an equal amount of resources to alleviate households' credit constraints.
In this appendix I present details of the model and the empirical analysis, and results of counte... more In this appendix I present details of the model and the empirical analysis, and results of counterfactual experiments omitted from the paper. In Section 1 I describe a simple example that illustrates how, even in the absence of human capital acquisition, productivity shocks, or separation shocks, the learning component of the model can naturally generate mobility between jobs within a firm and turnover between firms. I also include the proofs of Propositions 1 and 2 in the paper. In Section 2 I discuss model identification in detail, where, in particular, I prove that information in my data on the performance ratings of managers allows me to identify the learning process separately from the human capital process. In Section 3 I describe the original U.S. firm dataset of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmström (1994a,b), on which my work is based. In Section 4 I provide details about the estimation of the model, including the derivation of the likelihood function, a description of the numerical solution of the model, and a discussion of the results from a Monte Carlo exercise showing the identifiability of the model's parameters in practice. There I also derive bounds on the informativeness of the jobs of the competitors of the firm in my data, based on the estimates of the parameters reported in the paper. Finally, in Section 5 I present estimation results based on a larger sample that includes entrants into the firm at levels higher than Level 1. Results of counterfactual experiments omitted from the paper are contained in Tables A.12-A.14.
Essays on careers in firms
ABSTRACT This dissertation considers the determinants of individual careers within firms and it i... more ABSTRACT This dissertation considers the determinants of individual careers within firms and it is articulated into two chapters. The first chapter analyzes a learning model in which a firm and a worker can acquire information about the worker's ability by observing his performance at different tasks. The accuracy of the inference process about ability is assumed to depend on the task the worker performs. The firm's optimal retention and task assignment policy in a Markov perfect equilibrium of this game is characterized, by showing that equilibria are strategically equivalent to the solution of a multi-armed bandit problem with dependent and independent arms. The chapter identifies sufficient conditions under which an optimal experimentation strategy can be completely characterized and is essentially unique. It then explores how the firm's optimal information acquisition strategy changes in presence of human capital acquisition, of frictions in the task assignment process and of multiple dimensions of ability. Wage competition among firms can cause ex ante inefficient turnover and task assignment, independently of the degree of transferability of human capital across firms. Competition can also generate wage and promotion dynamics that are consistent with patterns observed in the data. The second chapter investigates to what extent uncertainty about individual ability affects the timing and job characteristics of a career. To this end, the model is structurally estimated using 10 years of observations on job assignments and performance ratings for the cohorts of managers entering the firm at the lowest managerial level between 1970 and 1979. Estimation results confirm that the model quantitatively fits the dynamic profile of the probability of retention and promotion at the major job positions within the firm. The model is also used to evaluate the effect on the value of information, the pattern of job assignments, and on turnover of changes in (i) market interest rates, and (ii) the information structure. Main findings are that both a more patient firm and a firm in which middle-ranked job positions provide sufficiently precise information about ability generate lower turnover of high ability managers, due to the increase in the value of information acquisition.
This paper develops and structurally estimates a labor market model that integrates job assignmen... more This paper develops and structurally estimates a labor market model that integrates job assignment, learning, and human capital acquisition to account for the main patterns of careers in firms. A key innovation is that the model incorporates workers' job mobility within and between firms, and the possibility that, through job assignment, firms affect the rate at which they acquire information about workers. The model is estimated using longitudinal administrative data on managers from one U.S. firm in a service industry (the data of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmström (1994a,b)) and fits the data remarkably well. The estimated model is used to assess both the direct effect of learning on wages and its indirect effect through its impact on the dynamics of job assignment. Consistent with the evidence in the literature on comparative advantage and learning, the estimated direct effect of learning on wages is found to be small. Unlike in previous work, by jointly estimating the dynamics of beliefs, jobs, and wages imposing all of the model restrictions, the impact of learning on job assignment can be uncovered and the indirect effect of learning on wages explicitly assessed. The key finding of the paper is that the indirect effect of learning on wages is substantial: overall learning accounts for one quarter of the cumulative wage growth on the job during the first seven years of tenure. Nearly all of the remaining growth is from human capital acquisition. A related novel finding is that the experimentation component of learning is a primary determinant of the timing of promotions and wage increases. Along with persistent uncertainty about ability, experimentation is responsible for substantially compressing wage growth at low tenures.
for invaluable comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessari... more for invaluable comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Econometrica, 2020
This paper examines the price of basic staples in rural Mexico. We document that nonlinear pricin... more This paper examines the price of basic staples in rural Mexico. We document that nonlinear pricing in the form of quantity discounts is common, that quantity discounts are sizable for typical staples, and that the well-known conditional cash transfer program Progresa has significantly increased quantity discounts, although the program, as documented in previous studies, has not affected on average unit prices. To account for these patterns, we propose a model of price discrimination that nests those of Maskin and Riley (1984) and Jullien (2000), in which consumers differ in their tastes and, because of subsistence constraints, in their ability to pay for a good. We show that under mild conditions, a model in which consumers face heterogeneous subsistence or budget constraints is equivalent to one in which consumers have access to heterogeneous outside options. We rely on known results (Jullien (2000)) to characterize the equilibrium price schedule, which is nonlinear in quantity. We analyze the effect of nonlinear pricing on market participation as well as the impact of a market-wide transfer, analogous to the Progresa one, when consumers are differentially constrained. We show that the model is structurally identified from data on prices and quantities from a single market under common assumptions. We estimate the model using data from municipalities and localities in Mexico on three commonly consumed commodities. Interestingly, we find that nonlinear pricing is beneficial to a large number of households, including those consuming small quantities, relative to linear pricing mostly because of the higher degree of market participation that nonlinear pricing induces. We also show that the Progresa transfer has affected the slopes of the price schedules of the three commodities we study, which have become steeper as consistent with our model, leading to an increase in the intensity of price discrimination. Finally, we show that a reduced form of our model, in which the size of quantity discounts depends on the hazard rate of the distribution of quantities purchased in a village, accounts for the shift in price schedules induced by the program.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2012
This paper develops and structurally estimates a labor market model that integrates job assignmen... more This paper develops and structurally estimates a labor market model that integrates job assignment, learning, and human capital acquisition to account for the main patterns of careers in firms. A key innovation is that the model incorporates workers' job mobility within and between firms, and the possibility that, through job assignment, firms affect the rate at which they acquire information about workers. The model is estimated using longitudinal administrative data on managers from one U.S. firm in a service industry (the data of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmström (1994a,b)) and fits the data remarkably well. The estimated model is used to assess both the direct effect of learning on wages and its indirect effect through its impact on the dynamics of job assignment. Consistent with the evidence in the literature on comparative advantage and learning, the estimated direct effect of learning on wages is found to be small. Unlike in previous work, by jointly estimating the dynamics of beliefs, jobs, and wages imposing all of the model restrictions, the impact of learning on job assignment can be uncovered and the indirect effect of learning on wages explicitly assessed. The key finding of the paper is that the indirect effect of learning on wages is substantial: overall learning accounts for one quarter of the cumulative wage growth on the job during the first seven years of tenure. Nearly all of the remaining growth is from human capital acquisition. A related novel finding is that the experimentation component of learning is a primary determinant of the timing of promotions and wage increases. Along with persistent uncertainty about ability, experimentation is responsible for substantially compressing wage growth at low tenures.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2010
We model a multi-period, principal-agent problem-in the presence of moral hazard-accounting for t... more We model a multi-period, principal-agent problem-in the presence of moral hazard-accounting for the possibility that the principal may prefer to replace the agent and that the agent may pursue alternative employment opportunities. To begin, we provide a recursive formulation of the contracting problem under full commitment and then compare the effect of variability in current and deferred compensation on the characteristics of the contract and the incentives of the agent. Subsequently, we contrast the properties of the optimal contract under full-commitment with those of the optimal contract under one-sided commitment (when only either the principal or the agent can commit long-term) and under uncertainty concerning principal-and agent-specific productivity (to capture the possibility of competition among principals). Finally, using uniquely-rich data and estimating the model structurally, we assess empirically the incentive power of long-term employment contracts offered to players in Major League Baseball, focusing on hitters.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2012
In this appendix I present details of the model and the empirical analysis, and results of counte... more In this appendix I present details of the model and the empirical analysis, and results of counterfactual experiments omitted from the paper. In Section 1 I describe a simple example that illustrates how, even in the absence of human capital acquisition, productivity shocks, or separation shocks, the learning component of the model can naturally generate mobility between jobs within a firm and turnover between firms. I also include the proofs of Propositions 1 and 2 in the paper. In Section 2 I discuss model identification in detail, where, in particular, I prove that information in my data on the performance ratings of managers allows me to identify the learning process separately from the human capital process. In Section 3 I describe the original U.S. firm dataset of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmström (1994a,b), on which my work is based. In Section 4 I provide details about the estimation of the model, including the derivation of the likelihood function, a description of the numerical solution of the model, and a discussion of the results from a Monte Carlo exercise showing the identifiability of the model's parameters in practice. There I also derive bounds on the informativeness of the jobs of the competitors of the firm in my data, based on the estimates of the parameters reported in the paper. Finally, in Section 5 I present estimation results based on a larger sample that includes entrants into the firm at levels higher than Level 1. Results of counterfactual experiments omitted from the paper are contained in Tables A.12-A.14.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2005
This paper develops and structurally estimates a dynamic model of learning in which a firm can ac... more This paper develops and structurally estimates a dynamic model of learning in which a firm can acquire information about a worker's ability by observing his performance over time. Ability determines both the profitability of a job and the job-dependent distribution of performance outcomes. Different output signals about a worker's productivity can be generated by the firm by assigning the worker to different jobs. Because of the trade-off between learning and shortrun profit maximization, the firm's optimal information acquisition strategy is the solution to an experimentation problem (a multi-armed Bandit problem with dependent and independent arms). Under the firm's optimal employment policy, the worker is assigned to jobs of decreasing degree of informativeness, as measured by the dispersion in posterior beliefs. The purpose of the analysis is to investigate to what extent uncertainty about ability affects the dynamic pattern of a worker's transition across jobs within a firm, i.e., the timing and job characteristics of a career. To this end the model is structurally estimated using longitudinal data from a single U.S. firm, on the cohorts of managers who enter the firm at the lowest managerial level between 1970 and 1979. Estimation results confirm that a theoretically restricted learning model can succeed in fitting the dynamic profile of the probability of retention and promotion at the major job positions within the firm. The estimated model is then used to compute the firm's value of information and to evaluate the effect on this value, the pattern of job assignments, and on turnover rates of (i) changes in the discount rate, which reflect changes in market interest rates, and (ii) alternative information structures.
Social Science Research Network, 2022
We develop a framework with rich worker heterogeneity, firm monopsony power, and putty-clay techn... more We develop a framework with rich worker heterogeneity, firm monopsony power, and putty-clay technology to study the distributional impact of the minimum wage in the short and long run. Our production technology is disciplined to be consistent with the small estimated employment effects of the minimum wage in the short run and the large estimated elasticities of substitution across inputs in the long run. We find that in the short run, a large increase in the minimum wage has a small effect on employment and therefore increases the labor income of the workers who were earning less than the new minimum wage. In the long run, however, the minimum wage has perverse distributional implications in that it reduces the employment, income, and welfare of precisely the low-income workers it is meant to help. Nonetheless, these long-run effects take time to fully materialize because firms slowly adjust their mix of inputs. Existing transfer programs, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), are more effective at improving long-run outcomes for workers at the low end of the wage distribution. But combining existing programs with a modest increase in the minimum wage generates even larger welfare gains for low-earning workers.
The authors thank the NSF and SIEPR for supporting this research, and Ross Batzer for invaluable ... more The authors thank the NSF and SIEPR for supporting this research, and Ross Batzer for invaluable research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Federal Reserve System. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
During the Great Recession, regions of the United States that experienced the largest declines in... more During the Great Recession, regions of the United States that experienced the largest declines in household debt also experienced the largest drops in consumption, employment, and wages. Employment declines were larger in the nontradable sector and for firms that were facing the worst credit conditions. Motivated by these findings, we develop a search and matching model with credit frictions that affect both consumers and firms. In the model, tighter debt constraints raise the cost of investing in new job vacancies and thus reduce worker job finding rates and employment. Two key features of our model, onthe-job human capital accumulation and consumer-side credit frictions, are critical to generating sizable drops in employment. On-the-job human capital accumulation makes the flows of benefits from posting vacancies long-lived and so greatly amplifies the sensitivity of such investments to credit frictions. Consumer-side credit frictions further magnify these effects by leading wages to fall only modestly. We show that the model reproduces well the salient cross-regional features of the U.S. data during the Great Recession.
RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, Aug 11, 2004
The paper studies a learning model in which information about a worker's ability can be acquired ... more The paper studies a learning model in which information about a worker's ability can be acquired symmetrically by the worker and a firm in any period by observing the worker's performance on a given task. Productivity at different tasks is assumed to be differentially sensitive to a worker's intrinsic talent: potentially more profitable tasks entail the risk of greater output destruction if the worker assigned to them is not of the ability required. We characterize the (essentially unique) optimal retention and task assignment policy for the class of sequential equilibria of this game, by showing that the equilibria of interest are strategically equivalent to the solution of an experimentation problem (a discounted multi-armed bandit with independent and dependent arms). These equilibria are all ex ante efficient but involve ex post inefficient task allocation and separation. While the ex post inefficiency of separations persists even as the time horizon becomes arbitrarily large, in the limit task assignment is efficient. When ability consists of multiple skills, low performing promoted workers are fired rather than demoted, if outcomes at lower level tasks, compared to those at higher level tasks, provide a sufficiently accurate measure of ability. We then examine the strategic effects of the dynamics of learning on a worker's career profile. We prove, in particular, that price competition among firms causes ex ante inefficient turnover and task assignment, independently of the degree of transferability of human capital. In a class of equilibria of interest it generates a wage dynamics consistent with properties observed in the data.
International Economic Review, Apr 28, 2015
In order to analyze careers both within and across firms, this paper proposes a matching model of... more In order to analyze careers both within and across firms, this paper proposes a matching model of the labor market that extends existing models of job assignment and learning about workers' abilities. The model accounts for worker mobility across jobs and firms, for varying degrees of generality of ability, and for the possibility that firms affect the information they acquire about workers through job assignment. I characterize equilibrium assignment and wages, and show how, depending on how abilities and jobs are distributed across firms, equilibrium gives rise to widely varying patterns of job mobility within firms and turnover across firms, even if matching would be perfectly assortative in the absence of uncertainty. The implied job and wage dynamics display features that are consistent with a broad set of empirical findings on careers in firms and the labor market. In particular, workers can experience gradual promotions and wage increases following successful performance but few or no demotions when employed by the same firm. The model also produces turnover across firms and occupations after both successful and unsuccessful experiences, leading to wage increases or decreases following a firm or occupation change. Overall, the results in this paper provide a unified framework in which to interpret the dynamics of jobs and wages in firms and the labor market.
Economic Policy Papers are based on policy-oriented research produced by Minneapolis Fed staff an... more Economic Policy Papers are based on policy-oriented research produced by Minneapolis Fed staff and consultants. The papers are an occasional series for a general audience. The views expressed here are those of the authors, not necessarily those of others in the Federal Reserve System. new productive skills with employment. Easing credit frictions on consumers then leads to a virtuous cycle in which consumers demand more goods from firms, which encourages firms to hire more labor, which increases employment and output, and thus stimulates a faster economywide recovery after a credit tightening. Policies that encourage this virtuous cycle would have greatly accelerated the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession relative to the policies that were actually practiced.
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Papers by Elena Pastorino