题目：Firing cost and International Business Cycle

主讲人：Juanyi Xu, Assistant Professor, Hongkong University of Science and Technology

Abstract

The European business cycle has lagged the US business cycle during the period of the great moderation. This paper constructs a two country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to calculate how much of this lag is due to a sluggishness in job creation induced by high firing costs. The model features search based unemployment with endogenous job creation and destruction. In one of the economies, job destruction faces lump sum taxation. Potentially, the taxation of job destruction creates disincentives for creating jobs. In a calibrated business cycle model, the job destruction tax in one country: 1) increases the unemployment rate in that country; and 2) causes the business cycle in the high unemployment country to lag the low unemployment country.