Research

Working Papers:

What Makes Hiring Difficult? Evidence from Linked Survey-Administrative Data (with Antoine Bertheau and Birthe Larsen)

We designed an innovative survey of firms and linked it to Danish administrative data to yield new insights about the factors that can influence firms’ hiring decisions. Several important findings stand out: (1) search and training frictions and economic uncertainty are as important as labor costs in hiring decisions ; (2) search and training frictions are more likely to affect younger and smaller firms; (3) uncertainty is more likely to affect hiring decisions in low-productivity firms; (4) thirty percent of firms prefer to hire already employed persons over the unemployed, because they believe that unemployed workers have lower abilities due to negative selection or skill depreciation during unemployment; and (5) these firms are more likely to report that labor market frictions and labor costs considerations discourage them from hiring.

The Political Impacts of Athletes Activism: Evidence from NBA

This paper provides evidence that NBA players' activism over the last few years has affected the political outcomes in the US. More specifically, I find that if a county has an active NBA player between the 2016 and the 2020 presidential election, and the player is the only player from the county in recent years, the percentage of people voting for the Democratic Party would increase by around one percentage point. This result is obtained by using Difference in Differences approach that compares these counties with a control group of counties that have an active minor league basketball player over the same period. I further show that these counties have an increase of protests of more than 30 percent one or two months after the police shooting of George Floyd. Despite the increase in protests, polarization does not rise in these counties as a result. I using CCES survey to show that having NBA athletes mainly increases the white population's awareness of racial inequality. These results support the role model effect channel and provide evidence that public leaders play a significant role in social movements.