Slow to Hire, Quick to Fire: Employment Dynamics with Asymmetric Responses to News

Professor Ilut’s major fields of interest are macroeconomics, international finance, asset pricing, and economics of information. Specifically, he focuses on the role of expectations and how agents incorporate information. He is currently focusing on settings in which agents face model uncertainty. Based on decision theoretical foundations (ambiguity aversion), he studies the role of such uncertainties for understanding macroeconomic issues like business cycle fluctuations, asset pricing and optimal policy.

Matthias Kehrig works on topics at the intersection of macroeconomics, productivity, firm dynamics and labor economics. His particular research interest lies on how firm-level differences shape aggregate outcomes and how aggregate fluctuations in turn influence firm-level dynamics. 

His most recent research project studies the micro-level anatomy of the aggregate labor share decline. Using micro-level business data from the U.S. Census Bureau, he finds that a set of few establishments become more and more profitable without expanding employment or sharing these productivity gains with workers as higher wages. Leading frontier firms derive their profitability from extracting higher prices from customers rather than cost cutting. 

Matthias Kehrig is currently an Associate Professor at Duke University, a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and a Research Affiliate at the CEPR. He earned a PhD and MA in Economics from Northwestern University after graduating with a dual MA in Economics and CEMS Master in International Management from the University of Cologne and the Stockholm School of Economics.

You can find my professional profiles here: Personal website, Google Scholar, SSRN, IDEAS/RePEc .

Let's talk on Twitter: @MacroMatthias.