Labor demand, productivity and business cycle: evidence from Portuguese large firms

• Autor(a) principal: Simões, N. N.
• Data de Publicação: 2004
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/501
• topic: Labor productivity; Business cycle; Labor demand; Labor mobility

What determines the cyclical behaviour of labor productivity? This article considers intra firm and inter firm explanations for the correlation between labor productivity and aggregate shocks. From a set of 2100 Portuguese firms with more than 100 workers, between 1995 and 1999, we found that: (1) aggregate labor productivity was procyclical, although more than half of the firms revealed countercyclical productivity; (2) procyclical intra firm effects were stronger than countercyclical inter firm dynamics; (3) both intra and inter firm theories are important to understand the dynamics of labor productivity; (4) cleansing effects dominated over sullying effects; (5) only a framework integrating several intra firm theories can explain the observed evidence.