WORKING PAPERS
Firm-Level Technological Change and Skill Demand, with Attila Linder, Balázs Muraközy and Balázs Reizer.
Revision requested by the American Economic Review
PUBLICATIONS
The Intergenerational Transmission of Welfare Dependency, with Monique de Haan.
Economic Journal, 135(669): 1609–1640, 2025.
Do Place-Based Tax Incentives Create Jobs?, with Hyejin Ku and Uta Schönberg.
Journal of Public Economics, 191: 104105, 2020.
[NBER Working Paper No. 25115] [Media coverage: VOX]
Can Compulsory Dialogs Nudge Sick-Listed Workers Back to Work?, with Simen Markussen and Knut Røed.
Economic Journal, 128(610): 1276-1303, 2018.
[IZA Working Paper No. 9090] [Media Briefing]
Productivity Growth, Wage Growth and Unions, with Alice Kügler and Uta Schönberg.
In "Price and Wage-Setting in Advanced Economies", European Central Bank Conference Proceedings, 2018.
[Media coverage: VOX, The New York Times]
SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS
Taxing Labor: Firm R&D, Automation and the Labor Share, with Hyejin Ku and Uta Schönberg.
We study how firms respond to an increase in the payroll tax, combining administrative and survey data from Norway. Due to an EU-imposed harmonization of geographically differentiated payroll taxes, Norwegian firms experienced differential increases in their labor costs, depending on their location and workforce composition. We find that in response to the tax increase, firms reduce employment and sales and invest more in R&D and cost-saving innovations, while their labor share falls. Value added per worker moderately increases following the tax increase. These effects persist even though the payroll tax increase was reversed four years after the initial increase.
Lifting barriers to firm entry: The role of entrepreneurs’ background for firm performance and growth, with Andreas Moxnes and Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe.
In this paper we make use of a reform that aim at reducing the barriers to entrepreneurship to study firm entry and who becomes an entrepreneur. The reform was implemented in Norway in 2011 and reduced the equity requirement related to setting up a firm. We show that in the aftermath of the reform the rate of firm entry rose substantially. Using rich administrative data for Norway, we further study the impact of the reform on who becomes an entrepreneur, and in particular the role of wealth and income. We moreover investigate the effects on firm dynamics, firm performance and firm growth. We highlight how reduced barriers to firm entry may matter for allocation of resources and aggregate growth.