To examine the importance of the two sources of costs of adjusting labor demand, net costs (of adjusting employment) and gross costs (of hiring and firing), the author collects new sets of short monthly time series from a medium-size hospital and three manufacturing plants. Models with quadratic...

Using a generalized asymmetric adjustment function including both costs of changing employment (net changes) and costs of hiring or firing (gross changes), the authors derive the profit-maximizing path of employment demand and the Euler equation whose parameters they estimate. Identifying the...