Asymmetries
Business Cycle Asymmetries and the Labor Market
Britta Kohlbrecher and Christian Merkl
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg
April 2022
This paper shows that a search and matching model with idiosyncratic training cost shocks can explain the asymmetric movement of the job-finding rate over the business cycle and the decline of matching efficiency in recessions. Large negative aggregate shocks move the hiring cutoff into a part of the training cost distribution with higher density. The position of the hiring cutoff in the distribution is disciplined by the empirical elasticity of the job-finding rate with respect to market tightness. Our model explains a large fraction of the matching efficiency decline during the Great Recession and generates state-dependent effects of policy interventions.