Research

Policies targeting disadvantaged areas aim to improve their conditions, but the labels they impose carry consequences of their own. In this paper, we examine Denmark's Ghetto Plan, one of the first recent place-based policies explicitly targeting migrant populations. Under this policy, certain public housing deemed “problematic'” were officially designated as “ghettos”, with minimal additional implications. Using rich administrative data and a Difference-in-Differences approach, we show that the policy backfired, worsening spatial inequality through compositional shifts driven by native avoidance. In addition, the policy was particularly detrimental to exposed natives, who accepted a 4% annual income loss to leave stigmatized areas.

The recent digital revolution has significantly broadened the scope of IT-related tasks in most occupations in the labor market. In this paper, we document these changes, we propose a novel conceptual framework for thinking about the effect of technological change that incorporates the changing task distance between occupations, and we investigate its impact on worker mobility using a gravity equation approach. Our results reveal that the evolution of skill distance between jobs significantly affected mobility patterns. Finally, we micro-found our gravity equation through a matching model to evaluate mobility in counterfactual scenarios without technological change.

Using French administrative data, we estimate the wage gap distribution between in-house and temporary agency workers working in the same establishment and the same occupation. The average wage gap is about 3%, but the gap is negative in more than 25% of establishment x occupation cells. We develop and estimate a search and matching model which shows that while the wage gap is largely inefficient, eliminating it reduces efficiency, as it also arises from objective factors that contribute to the efficient allocation of jobs. 

Leveraging a unique dataset merging patent data with all work-related migration reforms that took place in 15 countries over 26 years, we show that reforms discouraging inventor mobility decrease the patenting of MNE subsidiaries within a country, while reforms encouraging it have a positive but much smaller effect. Additionally, reforms attracting mobile inventors to the U.S., India, Japan and Korea decrease innovation in other countries, highlighting the existence of a global competition for talent. Finally, we find that policies easing migration have facilitated about one fourth of the shift in global innovation toward emerging markets.