About

Justin Bloesch is an Assistant Professor in the Cornell Department of Economics and in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. His research focuses on labor economics, macroeconomics, and inequality. He has contributed to public discussions on economic impacts related to labor markets and macroeconomic conditions, as evidenced by his analysis of the projected economic impact of severe winter storms on industries and his macroeconomic overview of the economy leading up to the 2024 election. His insights have been featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, PBS, and Reuters, where he discusses topics including the state of inflation, the cost of living crisis, and the CEO-worker pay gap. Based at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, he is actively engaged in research and public discourse on key economic issues.

Research topics

• Economics
• Labour economics
• Microeconomics
• Business
• Finance
• Monetary economics
• Macroeconomics

Selected publications

• Monopsony with Recruiting

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Do Cost-of-Living Shocks Pass Through to Wages?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Labour economics
  • Monetary economics
  PublisherDOI

• Do Cost-of-Living Shocks Pass Through to Wages?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Labor Market Tightness and Inflation Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Do Cost-of-Living Shocks Pass Through to Wages?

  Staff reports · 2024-10-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We develop a novel, tractable New Keynesian model where firms post wages and workers search on the job, motivated by microeconomic evidence on wage setting. Because firms set wages to avoid costly turnover, the rate that workers quit their jobs features prominently in the model’s wage Phillips curve, matching U.S. empirical evidence. We then examine the response of wages to cost-of-living shocks, i.e., shocks that raise the price of household’s consumption goods but do not affect the marginal product of labor. Such shocks pass through to wages only to the extent that higher cost of living improves workers’ outside options, such as competing jobs or unemployment, relative to their current job. However, higher cost of living lowers real wages at all jobs evenly, and unemployment is rarely a credible outside option. We conclude that wage posting and on-the-job search limit the scope for pass-through from prices to wages.

  PublisherDOI

• Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D

  Staff reports · 2023-11-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access1st author

  R&D investment spending exhibits a delayed and hump-shaped response to shocks. We show in a simple partial equilibrium model that rapidly adjusting R&D investment is costly if the probability of converting new hires into productive R&D workers (“onboarding”) is decreasing in the number of new hires (“congestion”). Congestion thus causes R&D-producing firms to slowly hire new workers in response to good shocks and hoard workers in response to bad shocks, providing a microfoundation for convex adjustment costs in R&D investment. Using novel, high-frequency productivity data on individual software developers collected from GitHub, a popular online collaboration platform, we provide quantitative evidence for such congestion. Calibrated to this evidence, a sticky-wage new Keynesian model with heterogeneous investment-producing firms subject to congestion in onboarding and no other frictions yields hump-shaped responses of R&D investment to shocks.

  PublisherDOI

• When do Firms Profit from Wage Setting Power?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Labour economics
  • Economics
  PublisherDOI

• How Labor Market Tightness and Job Search Activity Changed in the First Year of COVID-19 in India: Evidence from a Job Portal

  2022-11-30

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Which Workers Earn More at Productive Firms? Position Specific Skills and Individual Worker Hold-up Power

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Labour economics
  • Business
  • Economics
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jacob Weber

  7 shared

• Seung Joo Lee

  Chungbuk National University

  3 shared

• Paul Lombardo

  Monash University

  2 shared

• Michal Schneider

  Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute

  2 shared

• Birthe Larsen

  Copenhagen Business School

  2 shared

• François Gourio

  2 shared

• Kunal Mangal

  1 shared

• Niharika Singh

  1 shared