Martin Souchier

Insurance Inside and Outside the Firm

This paper presents a new model with optimal wage contracts, assets, and search frictions. Contracts are subject to hidden search and limited worker commitment, and workers can trade risk-free bonds subject to borrowing constraints. Assets play two roles in wage contracts. First, they allow firms to backload wages more and thus to retain workers more easily. Second, they are used to insure workers against unemployment risk, which is easier when wages are frontloaded. The optimal contract balances these forces and features tenure profiles for wages and worker mobility across jobs that are consistent with evidence from matched employer-employee data from France. Relative to a model without assets, the pass-through of firm-level productivity shocks to wages is three times larger with assets but the pass-through to consumption is two times smaller. Thus, when workers have access to insurance outside the firm in the form of risk-free bonds, firms provide less insurance to workers against productivity shocks but workers receive more insurance overall.

The Pass-through of Productivity Shocks to Wages and the Cyclical Competition for Workers

Using French matched employer-employee data, I document that after positive firm-level productivity shocks, the wages of stayers rise and job-to-job transitions fall. However, after positive sectoral productivity shocks, wages rise significantly more and job-to-job transitions rise. To explain these differences, I build a model with dynamic wage contracts subject to two-sided limited commitment and imperfect information and in which sectoral productivity shocks generate cyclical competition for workers. After a positive firm-level shock, a firm increases its wages to reduce the quit rate of its workers. This increase is limited because workers are risk-averse and value insurance against shocks and because there is no increase in the cyclical competition from other firms. In contrast, after positive sectoral shocks, the cyclical competition for workers heats up and workers become more likely to switch jobs. In response, all firms increase their wages more aggressively to retain them. I find that firing costs play a new role when contracts are endogenous: by enhancing the commitment power of firms, they allow workers to receive more insurance against negative shocks.

Environmentally Adjusted Multifactor Productivity: Methodology and Empirical Results for OECD and G20 Countries, with Miguel Cárdenas Rodríguez and Ivan Haščič, Ecological Economics, 153, 2018

Environmental Policy Design, Innovation and Efficiency Gains in Electricity Generation with Nick Johnstone, Shunsuke Managi, Miguel Cárdenas Rodríguez, Ivan Haščič and Hidemichi Fujii, Energy Economics, 63, 2017