We’re excited to welcome Claudia Macaluso to the Vancouver School of Economics for our 2025 Stone Inequality Seminar Series. Macaluso is an applied macroeconomist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. She’ll be presenting her paper, titled “Job Dynamics with Staffed Labor.”
Abstract
This paper quantifies the role of staffing in both plant-level employment adjustments and aggregate job reallocation. Staffing happens when businesses source labor through “renting” workers from staffing agencies, in place of direct hiring. We find that staffing is an important channel to both micro- and macro-economic job dynamics. Leveraging administrative data sources for U.S. manufacturing, we show that staffing is widespread and rising over time. On a yearly basis, one in two manufacturing plants recruits at least some of its workers through staffing, and staffing expenditure as a share of revenue has gone up for most plants. Furthermore, we show that staffing allows plants to be more dynamic in response to demand shocks. In particular, changes in staffing employment are larger and more immediate than changes in payroll employment. The creation and destruction of staffed jobs are also a large and increasing portion of aggregate job flows. Staffed workers perform their tasks at the client business’ premises and directives, alongside the client business’ own employees, but they remain legally employed by the staffing agency throughout different client assignments. Thus, their job changes are unaccounted for in official tallies. This omission is material: since 2006, correcting the total job reallocation rate for the creation and destruction of staffed jobs accounts for 37% of the decline in the measured aggregate job reallocation rate. We conclude that staffing is a quantitatively relevant channel of adjustment both at the plant-level and in the aggregate, and that the strategic use of staffing by U.S. manufactures underlies a significant shift, but not necessarily only a drop, in labor market dynamism.
Event Details
Date: April 14, 2025
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 PM
Location: Iona 533, 6000 Iona Dr, Vancouver, BC
—
Claudia Macaluso is an applied macroeconomist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and a CESifo Research affiliate. She obtained her PhD in June 2017 at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are labor market dynamics, skill mismatch, occupational and spatial mobility of workers, and human capital. Claudia is especially focused on understanding how labor market conditions across time and space affect workers’ choice sets and outside options. To this respect, she has studied how the local skill composition of jobs affects workers’ recovery after layoff, and whether the labor market is perfectly competitive. Claudia is currently working on estimating heterogeneity in the labor market and consumption experiences of workers of different races and incomes, and the contribution of staffed job flows to aggregate labor market dynamics. In ongoing data collection projects, she focuses on measuring occupational skills, tasks, and tools across countries, and documenting employers’ recruiting efforts and practices.