To estimate demand for labor, we use a combination of detailed employment data and the outcomes of procurement auctions, and compare the employment of the winner of an auction with the employment of the second ranked firm (i.e. the runner-up firm). Assuming similar ex-ante winning probabilities for both firms, we may view winning an auction as an exogenous shock to a firm's production and its demand for labor. We utilize data from almost 900 construction firms and about 3,000 auctions in Austria in the time period 2006 until 2009. Our main results show that the winning firm significantly increases labor demand in the weeks following an auction. In the years before the recent economic crisis, it employs about 80 workers more two months after the auction than the runner-up firm. Winners predominantly fire fewer workers after winning than runner-up firms. In the crisis, however, firms do not employ more workers than their competitors after winning an auction. We discuss explanations like labor hoarding and productivity adjustments induced by the crisis for these results.

In this paper, we analyze the dynamic behavior of employment and hours worked per worker in a stochastic general equilibrium model with a matching mechanism between vacancies and unemployed workers. The model is estimated for the U.S. using the Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) estimation technique. An increase in government spending raises hours worked per worker and crowds out private consumption due to a negative wealth effect. On the path converging towards the steady state, private consumption is below its long run average and increases, which implies that the interest rate is above its long run average and increases. The interest rate effect dominated the pure economic rent effect on the capital value of a hired worker to the firm, causing a reduction of job openings and consequently a decrease in employment. These results are contrasted with the predictions of a version of Burnside, Eichenbaum and Rebels?s (1993) labor hoarding model.

This paper examines the impact of fiscal policy on employment through the lenses of Okun’s Law. Looking at the panel of OECD countries over the past three decades, we find that fiscal policy can affect employment beyond the impact it is traditionally assumed to exert through the output multiplier. In particular, this impact is found to be effective for most items of current discretionary expenditure and for corporate income taxes and social security contributions. Okun’s Law is found to be stable under almost all model specifications, but higher spending on subsidies and lower social security contributions can amplify the impact of the output gap on employment gaps.