Published papers

We document a causal relationship between business uncertainty and workforce management at the firm level, by leveraging litigation-generated quasi-experimental variation in business uncertainty. The causal effects of business uncertainty on turnover, hiring and separations are of the expected negative direction, and of sizable magnitude. These consequences are stronger among firms that operate in sectors in which business uncertainty is intrinsically higher, and can be attributed to the effect of regulation induced business risk on normal operations. In particular, employee turnover, hiring and separations are ratcheted down to reduce the risk of additional wrongful termination lawsuits. Value added is also shown to decrease in business risk.

A large share of the gender wage gap can be attributed to occupation and employer choices. If workers are not well informed about these pay differences, increasing wage transparency might alleviate the gender gap. We test this hypothesis by examining the impact of mandatory wage postings. In 2011, Austria introduced a policy that requires firms to provide a minimum wage offer in job postings. To compare the pay prospects of vacancies before and after the introduction, we predict posted wages using detailed occupation-firm cells, which explain about 75 percent of the variation in wage postings. While we estimate a substantial gender gap of 15 log points, mandatory wage postings do not affect gender sorting into better-paying occupations and firms.

This paper uses matched worker-vacancy data to study gender differences in hiring outcomes of jobseekers in Austria. When registered at the public employment office, jobseekers are assigned caseworkers who refer them to suitable vacancies. Our findings show that female and male jobseekers are equally likely to get hired via such a referral, but it takes women longer to get a job offer. Most of the observed gender differences stem from younger jobseekers (below age 35) and are explained by rejections of employers. Young women are also less often hired for better-paying jobs. We argue that these differences are consistent with hiring discrimination against women in their fertile age. Our analysis shows that young female jobseekers are much more likely to go on parental leave in the future, while men almost never take extended parental leave. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that hiring differences are larger for jobs associated with higher replacement costs and smaller in tight labor markets.

This study examines how the COVID-19 crisis has changed the willingness of employers to offer teleworking options. We analyze job descriptions from vacancy postings on the largest Austrian job board to classify whether employers offer the option to telework to new hires. Our results show that the crisis has substantially increased the scope for remote work. About one year after the onset of the crisis, employers were 2-3 times as likely to explicitly offer such an option relative to levels before the pandemic. This effect is particularly strong for jobs that require at least a degree from a higher secondary school. Accounting for changes in vacancies by occupations and firms, we find that the impact is neither driven by an increase in the demand for teleworkable occupations nor by an increase in vacancies at teleworking-friendly firms. Although many social distancing restrictions were relaxed again during the summer of 2020, the effect persists throughout the first year of the crisis, suggesting that the pandemic may have long-lasting effects on remote working arrangements. To test the robustness of our results, we merge two external occupation-level teleworking measures to our sample. Both measures are highly correlated with our measure and yield comparable estimates for the impact of the pandemic on vacancies for teleworkable occupations.

We study to what extent familism accounts for the intergenerational transmission of jobs in regulated professions, and we examine the relevance of social norms to counteract familism. Before 2004, local courts graded the Italian bar exams for lawyers, and after 2004, exams were randomly assigned to external courts for grading. We measure family ties with the number of successful candidates sharing a family name and law firm address with an already registered lawyer. We find that the number of new entrants with a family tie drops by at least 10%, while the number of new lawyers does not change, showing that familism accounts for an important part of the intergenerational transmission in our setting. We do not find significant differences across gender, but our results are stronger in areas with weak social norms, although these areas have lower rents from licenses, suggesting that weak social norms rather than economic incentives are the main determinants of familism.

This paper empirically investigates the effects of services imports and exports on firm employment. We use microdata on Italian firms for the period 2009–2017. Applying a shift-share instrumental variable approach, we show that services imports and exports have a positive impact on total employment. This finding holds for managers, white-collar workers, and blue-collar workers. We also show that services exports are particularly effective in increasing employment of “servitized” manufacturing firms as well as of companies that are deeply integrated into international services markets. Overall, this paper suggests that firm employment might largely benefit from the services trade dimension of globalization.

We present industry-level evidence that manufacturing sectors that make use of services as inputs more intensively are more robust to shocks from import competition. Specifically, the negative effect of the China shock on US manufacturing employment is lower for industries with high services input intensity. Furthermore, our analysis reveals significant heterogeneity in the impact of different types of services, which points towards a fruitful research agenda on the role of services as a determinant of firm competitiveness.