Department of Economics Seminar Series - Dr. Konstantin Platonov
You are invited to a Economics Department Seminar Series, which continues with its fourth talk this Friday, April 11, from 11:00am-12:00pm in SSPA-204. The speaker will be Dr. Konstantin Platonov who will present a paper entitled "Post-Pandemic Recovery: Search and Matching, Market Power, and Endogenous Labor Demand"
Dr. Platonov is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Loyola Marymount University. He earned his PhD in Economics from UCLA in 2019 and has already published several articles in high-quality economics journals. His research interests include Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics, and International Economics. Primarily, he studies how beliefs and expectations influence economic outcomes.
"Following the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. output rebounded quickly, labor productivity rose above pre-pandemic levels, profit rates increased, and the labor market tightened, all despite high unemployment. These observations can be reconciled in a search and matching model of the labor market with two key assumptions: a strong firm market power and endogenous labor demand. Market power encourages firm entry when prices rise, while endogenous labor
demand allows firms to adapt to shocks rather than shut down. Two regimes arise: with weak market power, representing the pre-pandemic era, and with strong market power, explaining the post-pandemic recovery. Under strong market power, firm entry drives a quick recovery after recessions: the labor market tightens, wages and producer prices go up, and the average firm size shrinks, consistent with the post-pandemic data. This paper shows how a typical business cycle can be reconciled with the post-pandemic recovery in a unified model."
