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.

Technological change affects labor markets not only by shifting labor demand across occupations, but also by reshaping the skill distances that govern workers’ ability to move between jobs. This paper studies the digitalization wave of the 2010s using task data from online job postings, matched employer–employee data, and a gravity framework of occupational mobility. We show that while most occupations became more digital, skill distances converged for some occupation pairs and diverged for others, increasing mobility along some pathways and reducing it along others. Counterfactual simulations show that these frictions are meaningful and slow reallocation out of shrinking occupations.

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. 

While prior literature has highlighted the role of migration in overcoming the role of national borders in constraining knowledge flows, the extent of migration is ultimately shaped by national policies. In this paper, we investigate how such policies shape innovation in multinational enterprises (MNE), by contrasting their local and global effects. Leveraging a unique dataset that merges patent data with all work-related migration reforms that took place in 15 countries over 26 years, we show that permissive reforms have a positive effect on local innovation of MNE subsidiaries, while restrictive reforms reduce local innovation. The effect is asymmetric, with restrictive reforms having an impact four times greater than permissive ones. However, MNE-level innovation remains resilient to local negative shocks. Finally, we show that migration reforms generate significant cross-border spillovers and can explain shifts in the global distribution of inventive activities toward emerging countries.