Abstract EN:

This thesis is concerned with two major economic challenges of the past decade. The first two chapters deal with the employment effects of financial crises and the third one focuses on the secular productivity slowdown and rising firm inequality. The first chapter investigates the role of financial conditions for employment dynamics, by revisiting Okun’s law relationship and its potential asymmetry. It shows that Okun’s law asymmetry doesn’t occur during all recessions but only when these episodes are associated with financial disruptions. This chapter suggests that the asymmetry in Okun’s law is possibly related to the directeffects of financial constraints on firms’ labour demand, in line with the mechanism discussed by Jermann and Quadrini (2012).The second chapter focuses on the 2008-9 global financial crisis and identifies the effect of liquidity constraints on employmentrelated to the aforementioned mechanism. This chapter uses unique data from the DynEmp project (OECD), and exploits thesemicro-aggregated data based on the universe of firms for 13 countries. This chapter shows that liquidity constraints affect employment mainly through the job destruction margin. The third chapter focuses on the recent productivity slowdown, taking into account firm hetero geneity, thanks to the MultiProd dataset (OECD) that provides a detailed accounting of productivity dynamics for the universe of firms in a large number of countries. This chapter focuses on firms at the bottom of the productivity distribution, laggards, and highlights a slow diffusion of technology and knowledge, due to barriers related to the digital transformation.