To what extent do firms pass through idiosyncratic shocks to their workers? In this paper, we investigate this question focusing on passthrough to income for workers that stay in the firm and passthrough to employment stability. We take an empirical approach and use matched employer-employee data from Denmark, three different measures of firm performance (sales, value added, and value added per worker), and two measures of income (earnings and hourly wages). We distinguish between unemployment and job-to-job transitions.
We find that passthrough to income is much higher for permanent (5-9 percent) than transitory (1 percent) shocks. Income passthrough is higher for blue collar workers and workers in small firms. On the employment margin, we find that worse firm performance increases both unemployment and job-to-job transitions. The unemployment risk is especially pronounced for blue collar, low-educated, low tenure workers, while the effect on job-to-job transitions is larger for managers and high-educated workers. We also find clear evidence of non-linearities with negative shocks driving both unemployment and job-to-job transitions.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.