Essays on Technological Change, Skill Premia and Development.
You can download my thesis here. My defense takes place on 29 September 2020, and I am grateful to Eric Bartelsman, Richard Freeman, Anna Salomons, Marcel Timmer and Jan Luiten van Zanden for accepting the invitation to be in my PhD committee.
Occupational Skill Premia around the World (NBER Working Paper No. 26863, 2020. Joint with Richard B. Freeman and Remco Oostendorp, paper and appendix)
Firms hire workers to undertake tasks and activities associated with particular occupations, which makes occupations a fundamental unit in economic analyses of the labor market. Using a unique set of data on pay in identically defined occupations in developing and advanced countries, we find that occupational pay differentials narrowed substantially from the 1950s to the 1980s, then widened through the 2000s in most countries, creating a U-shaped pattern of change. The narrowing was due in part to the huge worldwide increase in the supply of educated workers. The subsequent widening was due in part to the weakening of trade unions and a shift in demand to more skilled workers associated with rising trade. The data indicate that supply, demand, and institutional forces are all drivers of occupational differentials, ruling out simple single factor explanations of change. The paper concludes with a call for improving the collection of occupational wage data to understand future changes in the world of work.
Deskilling among Manufacturing Production Workers (Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper 2019-050/VI.
Although four out of five manufacturing employees work in production occupations in most countries (as opposed to white collar occupations), there is little international evidence on how the transition to more capital intensive production methods has affected the demand for different groups of manufacturing production workers. In this article, I use new occupational wage and employment data to document a global decline in the relative demand for skilled production workers in manufacturing since the 1950s. They tended to work in craftsman occupations, and commanded wages even rivaling those of some white collar workers. However, the demand for manufacturing craftsmen decreased in countries of all income groups and regions over the following decades, and declining relative craftsmen wages and employment have been associated with increasing capital intensities of production. My findings reconcile conflicting characterizations of technological change throughout the 20th century as either `skill biased' or `deskilling', and suggest that the polarization of labor demand in manufacturing precedes ICT. They also point to a decreasing number of manufacturing jobs in which workers with little formal education can acquire significant marketable skills.
Also see this column on VOXeu for a non-technical summary of the findings. Coverage in the Belgian newspaper de Standaard ("Robots treffen vooral de betere vakman", in Dutch), and by economics blogs (Brad DeLong, Marginal Revolution, Naked Capitalism).
Premature Deindustrialization Through the Lens of Occupations: Which Jobs, Why, and Where? (Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper 2019-19-033/V, submitted to the Journal of Economic Growth)
A recent literature documents that manufacturing employment growth in developing countries has been sluggish over the past decades, and that deindustrialization has often set in at historically low levels of income. However, there is little evidence on which kind of jobs are disappearing prematurely, and some debate on whether the phenomenon is structural or transitory. In this article, I use a new data set on manufacturing employment by occupation to document four stylized facts about `premature deindustrialization’: first, it is mostly unskilled jobs that have disappeared, and also the wage premium of workers with little formal education in manufacturing relative to other industries has declined. Second, the disappearing jobs have been among the most formal–both relative to other industries, and to the manufacturing average. Third, premature deindustrialization has been driven by occupations which are intensive in tasks that are vulnerable to an increasing adoption of ICT. Fourth, the phenomenon pertains most clearly to middle income countries, as low income countries have been spared from premature job losses. Overall, the employment patterns are consistent with a pervasive shift of the `automation frontier' separating tasks that are automated from those which are not, and suggest a structural decrease in the ability of manufacturing to employ unskilled labor productively.
Coverage by Dani Rodrik.
Intertemporal Choice and Income Regularity: Non-Fungibility in the Timing of Income among Kenyan Farmers (joint with Berber Kramer, published in the Journal of Development Studies)
The optimal design of informal contracts in agricultural value chains depends on when farmers prefer to be paid for their output. While the evidence from time preference experiments suggests a preference for early payments, field studies often indicate that farmers will defer regular payments if given the opportunity. In this study, we explicitly test whether farmers are more patient regarding regular, earned income than regarding experimental windfall payments. We asked farmers in a dairy cooperative in Kenya to allocate both their milk income and a one-time gift between an early and a deferred payment date. We find that a large majority of participants deferred their milk payments, while rarely choosing to defer the gift. Participants' survey responses suggest that we observe this difference because of mental accounting: participants earmarked their regular milk payments, but not the gift, to save for bulky expenditures. We conclude that deferred payments can provide value to producers by functioning as a savings device, even when decisions over windfall income suggest a preference for early payments.
Der Sachverständigenrat für Wirtschaft braucht mehr Pragmatismus und weniger Ideologie (2017)
A critique of the German Council of Economic Advisers on `Oekonomenstimme' (in German, link)
It's the economy, stupid! (2016)
An argument for a predominantly economic background of the Brexit and Trump-votes on the website of the `Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung' (FAZ) (in German, link)
Gegen eine Kleinstaaterei in der Volkswirtschaftslehre (2015, joint with Jonas Bausch)
A contribution to the debate about pluralism in economics on the website of the `Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung' (FAZ) (in German, link)
Sommergrundlinien (2012)
Co-author of the quarterly business cycle forecast of the German Institute for Economic Research (in German, link)