Research
Publications
“Measuring the Technological Bias of Robot Adoption and its Implications for the Aggregate Labor Share,” (with Ilya Manuylov) Research Policy Volume 52, Issue 9, November 2023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2023.104848
“Domestic and Foreign Acquisitions, Plant Survival and Employment Effects,” (with Roger Bandick) Applied Economics Letters Volume 30, Number 7, Pages 923-926, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504851.2022.2030033
“Robots and Firms,” (with Ilya Manuylov and Marcel Smolka) The Economic Journal Volume 131, Issue 638, August 2021, Pages 2553–2584. https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueab009 Winner of the 2021 Royal Economic Society Prize
"Working from Home, Wages, and Regional Inequality in the Light of COVID-19," (with Michael Irlacher) The Journal of Economics and Statistics (Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik) vol. 241, no. 3, 2021, pp. 373-404. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbnst-2020-0030
“Offshoring and Non-monotonic Employment Effects across Industries in General Equilibrium,” (with Daniel Baumgarten and Michael Irlacher) European Economic Review, 2020, 130: 103583. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2020.103583
“Offshoring and firm overlap: Welfare effects with non‐sharp selection into offshoring,” (with Stella Capuano, Hartmut Egger and Hans‐Jörg Schmerer) Review of International Economics, 2020, 28: 138 – 167. https://doi.org/10.1111/roie.12445
“Foreign Ownership and Skill-biased Technological Change,” (with Marcel Smolka) Journal of International Economics, 2019, 118, 94-104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2019.01.017
“Skills, tasks and the scarcity of talent in a global economy,” Review of International Economics, 2016, 24(3), 536-563. https://doi.org/10.1111/roie.12222
“Labour unions and multi‐product firms in closed and open economies,” (with Hartmut Egger) Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, 2012, 45(4), 1456-1479. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5982.2012.01745.x
Work in Progress
Tasks, Occupations, and Wage Inequality in an Open Economy (with Sascha O. Becker, Hartmut Egger and Marc-Andreas Muendler)
This project documents and theoretically explains a nexus between globalization and residual wage inequality through internal labor market reorganization. Combining time-varying within-occupation task information from representative German labor force surveys with linked plant-worker data for Germany, we establish three interrelated facts: (1) larger plants and exporters organize production into more occupations, and (2) workers at larger plants and exporters perform fewer tasks within occupations, while (3) overall and residual wages are more dispersed at larger plants. To explain these facts, we build a model in which the plant endogenously bundles tasks into occupations and workers match to occupations. By splitting the task range into more occupations, the plant can assign workers to a narrower task range per occupation, reducing worker mismatch and raising worker efficiency as well as the within-plant dispersion of wages. Embedding this rationale into a Melitz (Econometrica 2003) model, where fixed span-of-control costs increase with occupation counts, we show that inherently more productive (exporter) plants exhibit higher worker efficiency and wider wage dispersion and that economy-wide wage inequality is higher in the open economy for an empirically confirmed parametrization. Estimation of our model shows that a worker's average number of tasks is inversely related to plant revenues and that the within-plant wage dispersion is positively related to plant size. We aim to implement a structural estimation of key model parameters in order to quantify the effects of trade on the specific form on inequality considered in this research paper and to facilitate a counterfactual analysis that provides insights on whether the opening up of China has contributed to increasing wage inequality in Germany.
Multiproduct Mergers and the Product Mix in Domestic and Foreign Markets (with Jackie M.L. Chan and Michael Irlacher) CESifo, Munich, 2022 Working Paper No. 9722 [Link], Revise & Resubmit at The Review of Economics and Statistics
This paper investigates the effects of mergers on the product mix of multiproduct firms. Thus, we open the black box of post-merger efficiency improvements to reveal a new margin of adjustment along the product dimension. We analyze horizontal mergers in a theoretical model where oligopolistic firms employ a flexible manufacturing technology and allocate assets between differentiated varieties. After a merger, acquirers drop products from their consolidated domestic product portfolio and reallocate assets towards core varieties. We further demonstrate that such merger-induced efficiency gains imply greater activity in foreign markets. Using detailed Danish register data, we document novel facts regarding mergers and multiproduct firms and find empirical evidence strongly supporting the model's predictions. Our results show that the number of domestic products of the post-merger acquirer falls relative to the sum of the pre-merger acquirer and target, that skewness of domestic sales rises towards core products, and that export activity increases.
Artificial Intelligence, Tasks, Skills and Wages: Worker-Level Evidence from Germany (with Erik Engberg, Magnus Lodefalk and Sarah Schroeder), Working Paper, 2023 [Link]
This study examines the effect of firm-level adoption of industrial robots on labor cost adjustments using a unique data set of Spanish manufacturing firms. Our results suggest that robot-adopting firms exhibit greater labor cost stickiness than non-adopters. Robot adoption leads to a greater demand for high-skilled workers to perform complementary and complex tasks (i.e., upskilling). As skilled labor is associated with higher labor adjustment costs, managers seem less willing to adjust labor resources during downturns. A difference-in-differences analysis using the Spanish labor reform of 2010 as a quasi-natural experiment reveals even more amplified labor cost stickiness of robot-adopting firms in the post-reform period. While the overall labor market was greatly deregulated, the “war for talent” for high-skilled workers seems even more pronounced for robot-adopting firms. Our findings go contrary to the widespread notion that robots are "stealing" human jobs.
The Implications of the Interplay between Global Value Chains and Technology for Labour Productivity and Demand (with Sotiris Blanas, Phu Huynh and Christian Viegelahn), Working Paper 2024 [Link]
Leveraging a new sample of 35 industries covering the entire economies of 62 developed and developing countries in 2000--2019, we derive a broad set of insights about the implications of Global Value Chains (GVCs) and their interplay with technology for labour productivity and demand. Participation in GVCs through linkages with suppliers (i.e., backward) and buyers (i.e., forward) increased labour productivity of industries, but the productivity gains from backward participation operated through larger employment losses than output losses, while productivity gains from forward participation operated through output gains or employment losses. Also, GVC participation, especially through backward linkages, was skill-biased, having increased the employment share of workers in high-skilled occupations and decreased the employment shares of young and female workers. By distinguishing between high- and lower-income countries and taking advantage of initial cross-industry differences in the intensities of utilisation of CT, IT, software, and industrial robots, we obtain additional evidence pointing to the critical role of the interplay between GVCs and technology for labour productivity and demand.
Firm-Level Robot Adoption and Labor Cost Behavior (with Johannes Voshaar and Thomas R. Loy), Working Paper, 2024 [Link]
This study examines the effect of firm-level adoption of industrial robots on labor cost adjustments using a unique data set of Spanish manufacturing firms. Our results suggest that robot-adopting firms exhibit greater labor cost stickiness than non-adopters. Robot adoption leads to a greater demand for high-skilled workers to perform complementary and complex tasks (i.e., upskilling). As skilled labor is associated with higher labor adjustment costs, managers seem less willing to adjust labor resources during downturns. A difference-in-differences analysis using the Spanish labor reform of 2010 as a quasi-natural experiment reveals even more amplified labor cost stickiness of robot-adopting firms in the post-reform period. While the overall labor market was greatly deregulated, the “war for talent” for high-skilled workers seems even more pronounced for robot-adopting firms. Our findings go contrary to the widespread notion that robots are "stealing" human jobs.
Globalization, Migration, and the Spatial Organization of Production (with Jackie M.L. Chan and Lin Ma)