From a paper by Ilut, Kehrig, and Schneider.

Suppose hiring after good news is slower than firing after bad news. A bad aggregate shock that lowers the mean of the distribution of private signals then has two effects. On the one hand, the mean signal is lower so hiring falls on average. On the other hand, the typical signal now brings bad news and thus generates a stronger employment response. As a result, dispersion also increases.

Asymmetric adjustment to provate signals leads to a number of predictions beyond the comovement of aggregate volatility and cross sectional dispersion. In particular, it should induce negative skewness of employment growth in both the cross section and the time series. Moreover, firms’ actions in anticipation of relevant fundamental shocks should depend on the sign of the shock realization: for example, bad (good) productivity realizations should be preceded, on average, by large drops (small increases) in hiring. We verify both sets of predicitions in Census data.

…One posssibility is that the logistics of the hiring process directly make hiring more costly than firing. This could be, for example, because hiring new workers is subject to costly search, whereas firing is free. A second candidate for asymmetric adjustment comes from information processing: if firm decision makers are averse to Knightian uncertainty (ambiguity) and are uncertain about the quality of signals, then it is also optimal to respond more to bad news.

From a PSST perspective, I think that lots of new information, which could include good news as well as bad, could lead to a recession. We have figured out that previous patterns of specialization and trade are no longer sustainable, but we are not sure where the new ones are.