Abstract: Early-career labour market outcomes are important determinants of lifetime earnings. Using population-wide Dutch administrative data from 2006 to 2024, I document a divergence across graduation cohorts: labour market entry rates declined, while wage returns to early-career experience increased. This divergence occurred within firms and is not explained by selection or worker mobility. I argue that intangible capital deepening can account for these patterns. First, I develop a simple model in which experience-biased augmentation and substitution channels jointly generate the observed early-career patterns. Second, exploiting lumpy firm-level investment in an event-study design, I show that investing firms reduce their youth employment share, yet their wage-experience profile steepens. Finally, I calibrate a heterogeneous-firm model with dynamic investment to the event-study evidence and show that intangible capital deepening explains 30–70% of the aggregate early-career changes.

Selected for the IZA@LISER Summer School in Labour Economics (2026)

Presented: Sciences Po Labour Economics Reading Group; Le Mans GAINS Seminar; Erasmus University Rotterdam PhD Seminar; IZA@LISER Summer School

Abstract: We study the role of firms in shaping wage differences between workers on 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 pay premia earned by temporary and permanent workers. Our decomposition reveals that firms' contribution to the penalty arises primarily through sorting, rather than differential pay-setting within firms. 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. 

Presented: Torino LABORatorio R. Revelli Workshop; Richmond Fed (CORE Week; co-author); 1st Aarhus Workshop on Labor Markets (co-author); Maastricht University (co-author); Scottish Economics Society; University of Amsterdam MInt Seminar; Spatial, International, and Macro Seminar Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: We study how revenue-neutral corporate tax reforms affect aggregate investment, productivity, and welfare in a heterogeneous firm model. Along the schedule of reforms that hold corporate tax revenue fixed, we show that a high-rate-high-deduction regime generates more aggregate investment and welfare than a low-rate-low-deduction one. More generous deductions act as an investment subsidy, thus disproportionately benefiting small and medium-large firms, which invest more intensively relative to their size. This mechanism fosters capital accumulation despite the higher tax rate. However, the same mechanism reallocates capital away from the largest and most productive firms, reducing aggregate productivity. An event study exploiting firm-level variation in exposure to a Dutch fiscal reform supports our model's main predictions.

Presented: Theories and Methods in Macroeconomics; Dutch National Bank XAmsterdam Macro Workshop; 5th Sailing the Macro Workshop Ortygia (co-author); University of Naples Federico II (co-author);  7th Annual CefES Conference (co-author)

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.

 Presented: Erasmus University Rotterdam Brown Bag Seminar; Erasmus University Rotterdam PhD Seminar