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William Jungerman

© 2023 William Jungerman. Powered by Jekyll.
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About me

Hi! I’m a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I will be joining the Economics Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill as Assistant Professor in July.

My CV is available here.

Research

Working papers

Dynamic Monopsony and Human Capital (JMP)

Abstract (click to expand) A number of influential papers study monopsony power in static models. Among the papers that model dynamics with a finite number of firms, none model the process of human capital accumulation by workers. In this paper, I show that this has important implications for the measurement and welfare consequences of monopsony power. How large are properly measured markdowns? And what are the welfare gains of implementing competitive allocations once we have accounted for human capital accumulation? To answer these questions, I introduce a novel model of dynamic monopsony in which a large non-atomistic firm competes with a finite number of homogeneous firms for workers who learn on-the-job. The markdown has an additional dynamic term reflecting expected future changes in worker human capital. I estimate the model using rich matched employee-employer administrative data from France and find that the welfare gains from forcing firms to offer workers their marginal product are large. Moreover, the welfare losses are underestimated by 81% when ignoring human capital accumulation.


Production Function Estimation with Missing Data (draft coming soon) (with Kyle Herkenhoff)

Abstract (click to expand) This paper develops a method to estimate production functions when some inputs are unobserved. Due to data limitations in the U.S., there are no firm-level total factor productivity estimates for privately owned firms outside of the Manufacturing sector. We circumvent this issue by relying on the richness of matched employer-employee data instead. We extend the standard methodology by splitting the labor input into a predetermined stock of high skill workers and a flexible choice of low skill workers. This additional structure allows us to not only identify the model parameters, but also recover the unobserved productivity and capital stock of the firm. We provide a series of Monte Carlo experiments to validate our estimation algorithm, and we show that it is robust to alternate parameterizations of the production function and relaxations of our baseline assumptions.


Average Match Quality over the Business Cycle

Abstract (click to expand) This paper examines how the business cycle impacts the average quality of an employer-employee match. I study a model of the labor market with on-the-job search, aggregate uncertainty, and heterogeneous match qualities. I test two theories: the cleansing effect, whereby the low quality matches are destroyed during recessions, and the sullying effect, whereby firms post fewer vacancies during recessions and workers have fewer opportunities to move up the job ladder. I find that the sullying effect dominates and that average match quality is procyclical due to increased hiring out of unemployment during recessions. I extend the model to allow for an exogenous minimum wage and show that neglecting to account for the cyclicality of match qualities can lead to miscalculating the effects of the policy.


Work in progress

Learning from Firms and Coworkers
(with Fil Babalievsky and Jacob Adenbaum)

Monopsony in the Antebellum South
(with Kyle Herkenhoff and James A. Schmitz, Jr.)

Publications

Brexit, the City of London, and the prospects for portfolio investment
(with Barry Eichengreen, Mingyang (Chris) Liu)
Empirica, February 2020
Journal link - Copy BibTexcopied

Abstract (click to expand) This paper examines the international financial consequences of Brexit. It first provides a survey of the still limited literature on EU membership and international capital flows. It then provides new estimates of the impact of Brexit on cross-border investment utilizing data from the IMF’s Consolidated Portfolio Investment Survey. It lastly provides a comparative analysis of these same issues using data on cross- border capital flows from the BIS. The conclusion is that the impact on cross-border capital flows to and from the UK is likely to be substantial.


Teaching

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Contact

E-mail
junge076 at umn dot edu
william dot jungerman at gmail dot com

Mailing Address
4-101 Hanson Hall
1925 Fourth Street South
Minneapolis, MN 55455