Coordinated Firm-Level Work Processes and Macroeconomic Resilience

The production processes at many firms rely on a highly choreographed and interdepen-dent network of workers performing specialized jobs. We designed and implemented a targeted employer survey to measure the extent of coordination in work processes. We link this firm-level coordination measure to administrative data and find that firms with a more coordinated work process are more productive, pay higher wages, and experience lower worker turnover. Yet, these firms suffer more severe negative consequences from un-expected worker absences and adopt various strategies to mitigate such risk, the reliance on which we document. We also find that more coordinated employers suffer worse con-sequences of negative aggregate shocks. Finally, we discuss policies that may encourage firms to adopt more productive coordinated work processes by increasing the resilience of coordinated employers to negative idiosyncratic or aggregate shocks.& COPY; 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.