Authors: Justin Bloesch and Jacob P. Weber
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Staff Reports
Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D
Number 1075
November 2023 Revised October 2026
November 2023 Revised October 2026
JEL classification: E22, O36
Adjusting the rate of R&D spending is costly if the probability of converting new hires into productive R&D workers (“onboarding”) is decreasing in the number of hires (“congestion”). We show that such congestion induces R&D-producing firms to hire slowly in response to good shocks, and hoard workers in response to bad shocks, providing a microfoundation for the convex adjustment costs widely used to capture the delayed, hump-shaped response of R&D spending to shocks. Using novel, high-frequency productivity data on individual software developers collected from GitHub, we document quantitative evidence suggesting that congestion is an economically-significant feature of R&D investment production.
Author Disclosure Statement(s)
Justin Bloesch
The author declares that he has no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
Jacob P. Weber
The author declares that he has no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
The author declares that he has no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
Jacob P. Weber
The author declares that he has no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
Suggested Citation:
Bloesch, Justin, and Jacob P. Weber. 2023. “Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 1075, revised October 2026. https://doi.org/10.59576/sr.1075
Bloesch, Justin, and Jacob P. Weber. 2023. “Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D.” Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, no. 1075, revised October 2026. https://doi.org/10.59576/sr.1075
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