Firms’ Expectation Biases and Labor Market Dynamics

劳动力市场研究的标准方法是利用理性预期范式，要求工人和企业拥有关于控制个体和总体风险的随机过程的所有相关知识。这种方法在分析上是方便的，但它忽略了潜在的预期偏差对个体和总体劳动力市场结果的影响。虽然正在进行的研究分析了劳动者期望在劳动力市场中的作用，但企业期望的作用却很少受到关注。我们的项目通过分析企业对未来就业的预期偏差对劳动力市场动态的作用，使用实证方法和对异质企业劳动力市场模型的定量分析，填补了文献中的这一空白。该项目包括三个工作包（WP）。WP 1通过分析德国企业的调查数据来衡量企业的预期偏差，以及它们如何随企业特征、时间和地区而变化，从而提供了实证基础。除了研究现有的数据集外，我们还进一步收集了有关企业预期和实际工人流动的新数据。在WP 2中，我们使用企业动态的一般均衡模型来研究有偏见的就业预期如何影响企业的进入，退出和增长，异质性企业之间的劳动力配置，从而影响宏观经济结果，如总生产率，要素错配和福利。 在WP 3中，我们从理论上和定量上研究了偏差预期对个体和总体劳动力市场结果的影响，如失业，工人流动和工资动态。作为一个关键的创新文献，我们引入了一个双边的期望偏差，允许双方，企业和工人有偏见的期望。我们使用校准版本的模型来研究（1）地区差异在解释统一后东德各州缓慢趋同的预期偏差中的作用，以及（2）2000年代中期实施的劳动力市场改革如何通过对企业和工人预期的影响塑造德国劳动力市场的表现。

The standard approach in labor market research is to make use of the rational expectations paradigm by imposing that workers and firms have all relevant knowledge about the stochastic processes governing individual and aggregate risks. This approach is analytically convenient but it neglects the effects of potential expectation biases on individual and aggregate labor market outcomes. While ongoing research analyzes the role of worker expectations in the labor market, the role of firms’ expectations has received much less attention. Our project fills this gap in the literature by analyzing the role of firms’ expectation biases regarding future employment for labor market dynamics, using empirical methods and quantitative analysis of labor market models with heterogeneous firms. The project comprises three work packages (WP). WP 1 provides the empirical foundation by analyzing survey data for German firms to measure firms' expectations biases, and how they vary with firm characteristics, over time, and across regions. In addition to studying existing datasets, we further collect new data on firms’ expected and realized worker flows. In WP 2, we use a general equilibrium model of firm dynamics to investigate how biased employment expectations impact the entry, exit and growth of firms, the allocation of labor among heterogeneous firms, and thereby affect macroeconomic outcomes such as aggregate productivity, factor misallocation, and welfare.  In WP 3, we study theoretically and quantitatively the implications of biased expectations on individual and aggregate labor market outcomes such as unemployment, worker flows and wage dynamics. As a key innovation with respect to the literature, we introduce a two-sided expectation bias by allowing both, firms and workers to have biased expectations. We use a calibrated version of the model to study (1) the role of regional differences in expectation biases for explaining the sluggish convergence of East-German states since reunification, and (2) how the labor market reforms implemented in the mid-2000s have shaped the performance of the German labor market via their effect on firms’ and workers’ expectations.