Företagskopplingar och arbetskraftsflöden

Most firms operate in environments marked by large fluctuations in production and sales. Consequently, firms must continuously adjust their inputs. However, labor inputs are often acquired in discrete bundles through frictional labor markets, making labor adjustments sluggish, especially in small organizations and teams. Access to a larger labor pool can mitigate these frictions by allowing organizations to "smooth out" labor inputs and better insure against the various shocks they face.
In labor economics, firms are typically viewed as independent entities engaged in independent search and competition for workers within a turbulent economic environment, facing costs when hiring or firing. As a result of this turbulence, firms often experience either a surplus or a deficit of workers, and these imperfect adjustments create potential gains from trade if workers could be moved from firms with a surplus to those with a shortage. In many cases, these opportunities are likely to remain unrealized due to labor market frictions. However, firms often participate in informal networks that link otherwise independent firms, facilitating a more efficient exchange of workers.
This project explores the role of directors' personal connections in helping firms move beyond traditional boundaries when adjusting labor inputs. Motivated by the broader literature on employee referrals (e.g., Dustmann et al., 2016; Kramarz and Skans, 2014) and firm networks (e.g., Bizjak et al., 2009; Fracassi, 2017), we investigate how informal firm-to-firm connections arising from shared board memberships (interlocks) and family ties impact labor mobility and resource allocation.
This project leverages detailed Swedish administrative data sources that link universal directorship data with population registers, allowing us to identify both board interlocks and family ties across firms, as well as linked employer-employee data and firm accounts. Additionally, to study how firm connections help firms adjust to various shocks, we add information on worker sickness absence and firm procurement.
We address several key research questions. First, we study how widespread these informal connections across firms are. Second, using a dyadic event study design, we analyze how such connections facilitate worker reallocation across connected firms. Then, by comparing worker flows across connected and unconnected firms, we investigate whether movements across connected firms are qualitatively different from competitive reallocations between unconnected firms. In particular, we are interested in whether worker "exchanges" across connected firms are more likely to represent mutually beneficial labor adjustments rather than worker "poaching." Lastly, we employ a firm-level matched difference-in-differences design to examine whether connections mitigate allocative inefficiencies by enabling more efficient worker reallocation following shocks such as sudden absences or changes in product demand.