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.
Who Bears the Burden of Payroll Taxes at the Top?, with Gaute Torsvik and Gjermund Yndesdal
This paper estimates the incidence of a Norwegian payroll tax reform that introduced a five–percentage point surcharge on employer payroll taxes for earnings above a specified threshold. We find no evidence that the surcharge was shifted onto high-income workers, despite these workers becoming more expensive to employ. Instead, firms that were more exposed to the surcharge—those employing a larger share of high-income earners—reduced their overall wage bill relative to less exposed firms following the reform. This reduction did not stem from lower wage growth in highly exposed firms. Rather, these firms adjusted primarily through changes in workforce composition, hiring fewer high-income employees and more low-income employees.