Research

A substantial portion of the recent increase in wage inequality in advanced economies is attributed to the rise in between-firm wage inequality. At the same time, growing empirical evidence shows a rising reliance on intangible assets in the production process. We demonstrate that these two trends are related. Using industry-level data for European countries for the period 2000-2020, we show that intangible intensity positively affects between-firm wage inequality. When decomposing overall intangible capital into subcategories, we find that the effect is mainly driven by innovative property assets, such as R&D, licenses, and designs. Robustness checks and an instrumental variable strategy provide further support to these results. We interpret these findings as the outcome of technology-based effects arising from the distinctive characteristics of intangible assets and R&D, including their scalability and critical role in competitive advantage, which favour large and frontier firms.

We examine the effects of regional patenting on labor market outcomes. Linking SOEP data to PATSTAT and leveraging the knowledge complementarities embedded in collaborative patents between East and West Germany as a source of exogenous variation, we find that residents of West German counties that attract former East German knowledge have approximately 1.2\% higher income post-reunification. This is driven by regional industries benefiting from newly available knowledge. High proximity between an individual’s industry and their county patent portfolio explains up to a 22% increase in income. Our findings provide support for the causal link between innovation and economic performance.

SSRN Working Paper

This study leverages geocoding of underground publications, known as samizdat, to analyze the impact of access to political knowledge on shaping institutional change in the German Democratic Republic during 1989–1990. Survival analysis reveals that regions with greater underground press activity were significantly more likely to experience protests following the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. This delay is consistent with increased repression of dissent. However, support for regime change did not necessarily translate into support for a rapid German reunification, as evidenced by the voting results of the 1990 democratic elections. Although samizdat did not appear to serve a coordination function in the initial protests, the empirical results suggest that it played an informational role in shaping preferences toward gradual institutional change. Finally, in addition to its information function, underground press activities were instrumental in forming opposition that challenged the non-democratic regime, thereby contributing to the onset of democratization.

This article examines how within-population diversity, proxied by the migratory distance from East Africa of the ancestral populations, shapes contemporary entrepreneurial spirit. We propose that greater diversity within an ethnic group can foster stronger social comparison effects, motivating individuals to pursue entrepreneurial activities. By adopting an epidemiological approach, we examine this channel among US second-generation immigrants and use the corresponding migratory distance from East Africa of the parents' country of origin as a proxy for the variation in ancestral population diversity. Our empirical results indicate a positive relationship between population diversity and entrepreneurial disposition: individuals whose ancestral origins are geographically closer to East Africa, and thus more diverse, exhibit a higher likelihood of engaging in entrepreneurship. Consistent with our conceptual framework, we further document that ancestral groups geographically closer to East Africa are characterized by greater income dispersion and a wider distribution of productive traits, both of which are positively associated with entrepreneurial entry.