During the Great Recession, US regions that experienced large declines in household debt also experienced large drops in consumption, employment, and wages. We develop a search and matching model in which tighter debt constraints raise the cost of investing in new job vacancies and so reduce job-finding rates and employment. On-the-job human capital accumulation is critical to generating sizable drops in employment: it increases the duration of the benefit flows from posting vacancies, thereby amplifying the employment drop from a credit tightening 10-fold relative to the standard model. Our model reproduces the salient cross-regional features of the US Great Recession.

The US Great Recession featured a large decline in output and labor, tighter financial conditions, and a large increase in firm growth dispersion. We build a model in which increased volatility at the firm level generates a downturn and worsened credit conditions. The key idea is that hiring inputs is risky because financial frictions limit firms’ ability to insure against shocks. An increase in volatility induces firms to reduce their inputs to reduce such risk. Our model can generate most of the decline in output and labor in the Great Recession and the observed increase in firms’ interest rate spreads.