Research

Research Interests: International Trade, Firms and Productivity, Applied Econometrics, Policy Evaluation.

Working Papers:


42nd Meeting of the Brazilian Econometric Society, Online Meeting, 2020 (scheduled). We study how the introduction of broadband technology affects the occupational and educational structure of firms. Using Brazilian data, we circumvent endogeneity issues by exploiting quasi-random variation in the roll-out of fast internet and a physical constraint in ADSL connectivity. Establishments respond to broadband availability by expanding the share of management and operational positions at the bottom of the firm hierarchy at the expense of other top and middle layers. Furthermore, we observe employment polarization with respect to education and a clear negative effect on overall employment. The patterns are complex, such that they cannot be fully explained by the traditional skill-biased technological change or routinization hypotheses found for automation and computerization phenomena. The consistent evidence for the management layer across all types of firms strongly supports predictions of organizational theories and suggests that, in the initial stage, broadband might have introduced more nonroutine problems to be solved by managers. While our findings reveal that broadband diffusion may exert distorting effects on labor markets in emerging economies, they also suggest that resulting rearrangements in the internal employment structure are driven by efficiency-seeking firm behavior and are an important mechanism helping firms to survive in the market. 
XXIV LACEA-LAMES Annual Meeting, Puebla, Mexico, 2019. ANPEC 2018.

Work in Progress:

XXIV LACEA-LAMES Annual Meeting, Puebla, Mexico, 2019. XXI Conference on International Economics, Toledo, Spain, Online Meeting, 2020.35th Annual Congress of the European Economic Association, Online Meeting, 2020.

Publications


Other Publications

Technical reports: