Publications
joint with Sergi Basco (UAB), Marti Mestieri (Chicago Fed) and Gabriel Smagghue (Banque de France)
How does labor regulation shape worker adjustment to import competition? We estimate the effect of collective agreements on French workers’ earnings during the rise of Chinese import competition. Using a nationally-representative matched employer-employee panel and collective agreements data, we document that the negative effect of Chinese competition on workers’ earnings is stronger in more regulated industries. In addition, we find that this exacerbation effect is concentrated among workers in low-wage occupations, such as technical staff and skilled production workers.
The Effect of Import Competition across Occupations, Journal of International Economics, vol. 153, January 2025
joint with Sergi Basco (UAB), Marti Mestieri (Chicago Fed) and Gabriel Smagghue (Banque de France)
We empirically examine the effect of import competition on worker earnings across occupations. To guide our analysis, we develop a stylized factor-proportions model that emphasizes industries using occupations in different intensities. We derive an occupational exposure index that summarizes the overall exposure of a given occupation to rising import competition. Using nationally-representative matched employer-employee French panel data from 1993 through 2015, we obtain evidence consistent with the predictions of the model. We find that workers initially employed in occupations highly exposed to Chinese competition – as measured by our occupational exposure index – experience larger declines in earnings. We also document that workers tend to move out of hard-hit industries, but they tend to remain in their broad initial occupation. Our estimates imply that the overall effect of import competition on workers’ earnings can be roughly equally attributed to variation across workers’ initial industry and occupation.
Economics Bulletin, Volume 41, Issue 4, 2021
(longer version) - slides
How can externalities in the labor market influence the adoption of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices ? I build a search-and-matching model in which managers supervise teams of workers and intervene in the output process, in order to account for the equilibrium determination of managers' choice between labor-hoarding versus labor-churning HRM policies. I show that if congestion externalities on workers' side are strong enough, they are willing to accept moderate wages provided the job-finding rate is high enough, thus inducing managers to adopt labor-hoarding HRM policies. This fosters manager entry and results in a low-unemployment equilibrium. The model thus establishes a testable result, namely, a positive relationship between the strength of congestion externalities on workers' side, and firms' propensity to adopt labor-hoarding HRM policies.
Working Papers
The Source of Researcher Variation in Economics, SSRN working paper (2025), Project website
Nick Huntington-Klein, Claus C. Pörtner et al.
We use a rigorous three-stage many-analysts design to assess how different researcher decisions—specifically data cleaning, research design, and the interpretation of a policy question—affect the variation in estimated treatment effects. A total of 146 research teams each completed the same causal inference task three times each: first with few constraints, then using a shared research design, and finally with pre-cleaned data in addition to a specified design. We find that even when analyzing the same data, teams reach different conclusions. In the first stage, the interquartile range (IQR) of the reported policy effect was 3.1 percentage points, with substantial outliers. Surprisingly, the second stage, which restricted research design choices, exhibited slightly higher IQR (4.0 percentage points), largely attributable to imperfect adherence to the prescribed protocol. By contrast, the final stage, featuring standardized data cleaning, narrowed variation in estimated effects, achieving an IQR of 2.4 percentage points. Reported sample sizes also displayed significant convergence under more restrictive conditions, with the IQR dropping from 295,187 in the first stage to 29,144 in the second, and effectively zero by the third. Our findings underscore the critical importance of data cleaning in shaping applied microeconomic results and highlight avenues for future replication efforts.
Stuck in the Middle? Occupation-Specific Commute-Wage Trade-Off at the Metropolitan Level, BETA WP n° 2024 – 11
joint with Nathalie Picard (Université de Strasbourg),
How do middle-skilled workers trade off wages against commuting time, as compared to high- and low-skilled ones? In this paper, we leverage a quasi-exhaustive panel of jobs in France, to explore how unobserved heterogeneity can help characterize workers' trade-off at the metropolitan area level. We use estimated worker- and employer fixed effects in order to construct two measures of how constrained workers are, depending on their broad occupational group. A first measure, the Commute-Wage Gradient (CWG), captures the trade-off that a marginal entrant into a metropolitan area would face, while a second, labelled Monopsony Power Measure (MPM), gauges the extent to which employers' monopsonistic power influences workers' outside options at alternative employers. We find that middle-skilled workers are stuck, in the sense that higher-wage middle-skilled earners have to commute more, than otherwise identical high- or low-skilled workers, while being at the same time more subject to monospony power. By contrast, high-skilled workers are less constrained according to both measures. Last, we document non-monotonicites in the case of low-skilled workers, which is hardly consistent with a job ladder model.
Labor Market Structure, and the Size-Wage Premium, SSRN working paper (2025)
joint with Markus Gebauer (ICEF-HSE)
Empirical studies on monopsonistic competition in labor markets have consistently shown a higher employment concentration is associated with lower wages, lower labor supply elasticities, and larger labor markets being less concentrated. However, there is significant heterogeneity across labor markets, as the distribution of the number of employers per market is strongly skewed to the right: while a lot of labor markets are monopsonistic, a significant fraction is populated by a large number of employers. This calls for a theory connecting the employer size structure of labor markets with these empirical findings. We propose a Search-And-Matching (SAM) model of a labor market with heterogeneous firms, whereby job-seekers sample a subset of identifiable employers, among which they trade off wage offers against job-finding rates, while also applying at random to smaller, less identifiable employers. One direct implication of our model is a kinked size-productivity premium, for which we find robust evidence leveraging comprehensive French matched employer-employee data employing partial correlations between establishment-level wages and size. Our model also describes the reallocation effect from an increase in the labor force, which results in a lower market concentration, as smaller, less-productive firms grow more than more productive ones, in line with the well-documented fact that larger labor markets are more competitive.