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.

Using French administrative data, we estimate the distribution of the wage gap between in-house fixed-term workers and temporary agency workers employed in the same establishment and occupation. The average wage gap is approximately 2.6% in favor of in-house workers, but varies across labor markets and is negative in more than 25% of establishments-occupations. We analyze this heterogeneity by developing and estimating a search and matching model, which shows that while a large part of the wage gap is inefficient, eliminating it would not improve efficiency on all local labor markets, as it also stems from factors that contribute to the optimal 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.

Technological change requires workers to reallocate across occupations, but it may also reshape how easily they can do so by changing occupational skill requirements. We exploit digitalization during the 2010s to study this mechanism. We measure occupational accessibility by comparing occupational skill requirements in job-posting data. Combining these measures with French matched employer–employee data, we find that occupations becoming more similar in their digital skill profiles experience greater worker mobility. Counterfactual simulations based on a structural two-sided matching model indicate that changes in occupational accessibility generate worker reallocation amounting to 21 percent of that generated by observed labor-demand shifts.