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.

This study utilizes locations 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 can be attributed to the increased repression of dissent. However, support for regime change did not necessarily translate into support for rapid German reunification, as evidenced by the voting results of the 1990 democratic elections. Although samizdat did not appear to coordinate the initial protests, 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 determining the onset of democratization.

This article examines the effects of regional patenting on labor market outcomes. By linking SOEP to PATSTAT data 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. We argue that this result is driven by regional industries benefiting from newly available knowledge from East Germany. Higher proximity between an individual’s industry of employment and their county patent portfolio explains up to a 21% increase in income. These findings provide support for the causal impact of innovation on economic performance.

SSRN Working Paper

This article examines how within-population diversity, proxied by the migratory distance of ancestral populations from East Africa, shapes contemporary entrepreneurial spirit. Empirically, we adopt the so-called epidemiological approach and examine this channel among US second-generation immigrants, using the distance of their parents' country of origin from East Africa as a proxy for variation in ancestral population diversity. Our results indicate a positive relationship between population diversity and entrepreneurial disposition: individuals whose ancestral origins are geographically closer to East Africa, and thus characterized by greater interpersonal diversity, are more likely to engage in entrepreneurship. To interpret this finding, we develop a conceptual framework in which greater ancestral population diversity increases the dispersion of skills and competencies and thickens the upper tails of distributions of human capital and job non-routine task content. We provide empirical evidence consistent with these mechanisms and show that these channels contribute to higher entrepreneurship rates within ancestral groups.