Abstract: I study how early-career progression evolved during a period of rapid automation-led capital deepening. I use population-wide administrative data from the Netherlands (2001-2024), which allows me to track entire cohorts of young people from school into work. Over the last two and a half decades, the early-career ladder has become harder to get on because entry-level hiring rates declined, yet more rewarding for those who climb it. Returns to experience rose within narrowly defined worker types, which suggests that composition changes are unlikely to account for the increase. I show that my findings are consistent with complementarity between automation and experience: firm-level automation is associated with reduced entry-level hiring rates but higher returns to experience for those workers who are eventually hired. 

Abstract: We study the role of firms in shaping wage differences between workers hired under permanent and temporary contracts using matched employer–employee data from the Netherlands. Temporary workers earn 28 log points less than permanent workers, of which 28 percent is explained by differences in firm-specific pay premia. Our decomposition reveals that firms' contribution to the penalty arises primarily through sorting, rather than differential pay-setting within firms, as documented by previous work. In particular, about two-thirds of the firm pay-premium gap reflects the lower probability that temporary workers are employed at higher-paying firms, while the remaining one-third is driven by within-firm differences in pay premia.

Abstract: We study how corporate tax reforms affect the distribution of resources across firms. Motivated by a Dutch fiscal reform, we use a heterogeneous firm model to test whether a lower tax rate coupled with reduced investment deductibility improves allocative efficiency. We find that aggregate productivity increases and capital misallocation declines, driven by the reallocation of capital from medium-large to the largest and most productive firms. The tax cut disproportionately benefits top firms, enabling their expansion, while the deductibility reduction burdens medium-large firms that invest more intensively than others. 

Abstract: The U.S. aggregate labour share of income has declined significantly since the mid-1980s. The prevailing view in the literature attributes the decline to common, within-sector decreases in labour shares, thereby downplaying the contribution of sectoral reallocation. Using a new decomposition method, I show i) the long-term decline is overwhelmingly driven by sectors whose labour shares fell as they grew in size, ii) reallocation toward high-labour-share sectors would have offset nearly half of the total decrease, an order of magnitude more than previously found; iii) the within-sector effect is only half as large as other studies conclude, no larger than normal fluctuations over the business cycle.