Research

We estimate the impact of technological innovation on regional labor market outcomes.  Our identification strategy exploits pre-reunification complementarities in innovation between East and West Germany, drawing upon patent applications from PATSTAT. We rely on individual-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to analyze labor market outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences analysis, we find that individuals' income in West German counties with strong pre-reunification complementarities increased by 1.3%-1.5% on average after reunification. The effect is amplified when disentangling the results for different occupations, where income increases by 27%-29%. Self-employment increases significantly, while unemployment remains unaffected. The use of East German know-how in West German patents after reunification is primarily driven by the migration of East German inventors to West German counties after reunification, facilitated by pre-existing complementarities.

SSRN Working Paper

2024 RSA Student and Early Career Conference (Cambridge, UK), 15th International SOEP Conference (Berlin, Germany), DRUID2024 Conference (Nice, Florence), 2024 RSA Annual Conference (Florence, Italy), 2nd Workshop on the Economics of Science and Innovation (Bordeaux, France), University of Portsmouth Research Seminar (Portsmouth, UK), 7th Geography of Innovation Conference (Manchester, UK), 1st REGIS Summer School (Pisa, Italy), CEPIE Brown Bag Seminar (Dresden, Germany)

A striking feature of the recent increase in wage inequality in advanced economies is the rise in between-firm wage inequality. Concurrently, growing empirical evidence indicates a rising reliance on intangible assets in the production process. This article shows that these two trends are related. We use industry-level data for European countries for the period 2000-2020 to show that intangible intensity positively affects between-firm wage inequality. We interpret these findings as the outcome of technology-based and sorting-based effects arising from the distinctive characteristics of intangible assets, including their non-rivalry in use and their limited excludability. 

VfS Annual Conference 2024 (Berlin, Germany), 36th EALE Conference (Bergen, Norway), 10th ERMAS Annual Conference (Cluj-Napoca, Romania), 13th CompNet Annual Conference (Malta), 11th PhD Workshop in Economics of Innovation, Complexity and Knowledge (Turin, Italy),  CEPIE Brown Bag Seminar (Dresden, Germany)

2025 Scottish Economic Society Conference (Glasgow, UK), CEPIE Brown Bag Seminar (Dresden, Germany), University of Portsmouth Research Seminar (Portsmouth, UK)

14th ifo Dresden Workshop on Labor Economics and Social Policy (Dresden, Germany), BeNA Winter Workshop 2024 (Berlin, Germany)