Economics: Research Guide

The Autonomous Province of Trento (Trentino) is among the most productive regions in Europe, but over the past two decades its productivity growth has stagnated. As a result, the productivity gap of Trentino widened by over 20% compared to regions with the same productivity level in 2000. The benchmarking of productivity drivers in Trentino with those of “peer” regions points to several policy priorities, including: reviving productivity in tradeable sectors, also through increased internationalisation; increasing the share of the labour force with a tertiary education; and getting more out of public R&D while boosting private sector R&D.

In this paper, I study how converging to the productivity frontier influences a firm’s training investments. Although productivity growth induces a high-skill bias in firm’s workforce structure, little is known about its training incentives for vocational and technical skills. I address endogeneity in productivity growth using a two-stage control function approach where I use productivity shocks as exogenous changes to a firm’s position in intra-industry distribution. I find that closing the gap to the frontier leads to a negative effect on firm’s investment in training in vocational skills. The negative effect is stronger for large, multi-plant, innovative and technical advanced fir..

This paper documents the evolution of wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in Sweden throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Using newly digitized data on income taxes, this paper demonstrates that the skill premium decreased throughout 1900–1950, and most rapidly from 1930 onward. This is similar to the fall in skill premium documented by Goldin and Katz for the United States. However, unlike in the United States, the fall in skill premia in Sweden cannot be attributed to a supply shock of high school graduates. Rather, this paper shows that incomes of the low- and unskilled increased faster than those for more-skilled. Despite of similar technological chan..

Common wisdom suggests that beauty helps in the labor market. We show that two factors combine to explain away the mean beauty premium reported in the literature. First, correcting for publication bias reduces the premium by at least a third. Second, controlling for cognitive ability negates the premium for all occupations except sex workers, a point further underscored by the similarity of the beauty effect on earnings and productivity. The second factor implies a positive link, perhaps genetic, between beauty and intelligence. We find little evidence of substantial attenuation bias that could offset publication and omitted- variable biases. The empirical literature is inconsistent with dis..

This letter adds to the literature on the importance of telework experience in employee evaluation by leveraging the telework experience accumulated during the COVID-19 crisis. We conducted a follow-up survey on the evaluation of telework exactly three years after our initial data collection in 2020. We find evidence of a learning curve regarding self-reported i) efficiency in performing tasks, ii) work-life balance, and iii) concentration during work, characterised by a more positive evaluation as telework experience increased. Migration background, feedback on the job, and compatibility of the job with telework moderate the effect of telework experience on the evaluation of telework over t..

Children early in the birth order get more parental care than later children. Does this significantly affect their life chances? An extensive genealogy of 428, 280 English people 1680-2024, with substantial sets of complete families, suggests that birth order had little effect on social outcomes either for contemporary outcomes, or in earlier centuries. For a small group of elite families in the nineteenth century and earlier, the oldest son was advantaged in terms of wealth, education, and occupational status. But even in this elite group, among later sons, birth order had no effect. We consider in the paper how the absence of birth order effects in England can be reconciled with reports of..

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have become a key antipoverty policy in Latin America in the last 25 years. The ultimate goal of this kind of programs is to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty through the promotion of human capital accumulation of children in vulnerable households. In this paper, we explore this issue by estimating the long-run effects of the largest CCT in Latin America: the Brazilian Bolsa Familia. Through a combination of the two-stage-two-sample method and a difference-in-differences approach, we find evidence consistent with a positive long-run impact of Bolsa Familia among former beneficiaries. In particular, we find a significant positive effect on e..

This paper first presents a meta-analysis of the causal impact of cultural participation on well-being. The meta-analysis classifies the literature according to the strength of the evidence available and various types of cultural activities. Secondly, this paper uses data from time use surveys from Canada, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States to study individuals’ emotional responses to a series of daily activities. This is then used as a basis for an empirical assessment of the drivers of time allocation across different activities, showing that expectations of future well-being are one of the reasons why individuals decide to engage in cultural activities. Furthermore..

This paper documents the changing skill composition during industrialization in Sweden using population censuses and HISCO/HISCLASS scheme. The results reveal a general shift from unskilled to more-skilled occupations, though the trend differs by gender and sector. First, the skill upgrading was more pronounced for women, who left agriculture for better job opportunities elsewhere. Second, within manufacturing, there was a shift from medium-skilled to low- and unskilled occupations, consistent with the workshop-to-factory shift. However, this trend is mirrored by skill upgrading within services, where the expansion of trade and transport introduced new more-skilled jobs. Finally, I show that..

Notably, Africa countries have enjoyed relatively strong economic growth for the past years (decade) mainly because of impressive global demand for primary commodities. Unfortunately, Africa’s economic growth had failed to generate many good jobs and thus postponing the benefits of the demographic divided of a large working-age population. Consequently, digital (online) gig work is rapidly increasing new form of work that poses tough challenges and tradeoffs for African governments. Essentially, these gig jobs could be a stepping stone to better-quality jobs for young or low-skilled workers by way of assisting them to learn critical digital skills that closes the digital divide. However, g..

The promise of generative AI to increase human productivity relies on developing skills to become proficient at it. There is reason to suspect that women and men use AI tools differently, which could result in productivity and payoff gaps in a labor market increasingly demanding knowledge in AI. Thus, it is important to understand if there are gender differences in AI-usage among current students. We conduct a survey at the Norwegian School of Economics collecting use and attitudes towards ChatGPT, a measure of AI proficiency, and responses to policies allowing or forbidding ChatGPT use. Three key findings emerge: first, female students report a significantly lower use of ChatGPT compared to..

This paper studies optimal taxation of income and education when employers cannot observe workers’ productivity and workers signal their productivity to firms by choosing both quantity and quality of education. We characterize constrained efficient allocations and derive conditions under which there is predistribution, i.e., redistribution through wage compression. Implementation through income and education dependent taxes is discussed, as well as education mandates. A key insight is that achieving predistribution requires complementing the income tax with additional policy instruments that regulate the flow of information in the labor market and prevent high skilled individuals from sepa..

Data on online job postings represents an important source of information for local labour markets. Many countries lack statistics on labour demand that are sufficiently up-to-date and disaggregated across regions, sectors and occupations. Web-scraped data from online job postings can provide further insights on the trends in labour demand and the skills needed across regions, sectors and occupations. This paper assesses the comparability and validity between Lightcast and other data sources for Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden, for the years 2019 to 2022 across regions, sectors and occupations. It concludes with some recommen..

This paper presents the first international assessment of the Lightcast vacancy data representativeness based on benchmarking against officially reported vacancy data in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The analysis compares distributions in the Lightcast data versus official data across large (TL2) regions, industrial sectors and occupational categories. The analysis shows differences in representativeness across countries and on the three dimensions considered. In general, regional representativeness is considerably better than both occupational and sectoral representativeness.

We investigate the relationship between child socio-emotional skills and labour market outcomes using longitudinal data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. We perform a novel factor analysis of child skills and capture four latent dimensions, representing ‘attention’, ‘conduct’, ‘emotional’, and ‘peers’ problems. Conditional on a range of confounding variables, we ï¬ nd that conduct problems, driven by aggression and impulsivity, are associated with positive outcomes in the labour market: higher wages, higher labour supply, sorting into ‘good’ jobs and higher productivity conditional on job tasks. Attention problems are inste..

Informal employment is widespread across many developing countries and remains to be the source of livelihood for billions of workers and their families. Even though diverse forms of informal employment can be seen globally, the paper mainly focuses on developing countries due to high share and endurance of the informal sector. The aim of the paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the drivers and outcomes of informal employment by distinguishing between wage labor and self-employment. Additionally, the paper reviews potential policies that could incentivize workers and informal firms to transition to the formal sector. Given that the impact of informal employment on workers’ well-..

The present paper studies how to encourage longer careers by reducing labor income taxes for older workers. The analysis relies on numerical experiments within a general equilibrium overlapping generations model that is calibrated to an average OECD economy. I find that the policy can delay retirement and increase tax revenue if treatment occurs close to, and before, the preferred retirement age. A non-trivial share of the increased post-treatment labor supply can be explained by the substitution of hours worked from the pre-treatment career to the post-treatment career. Lowering the treatment age only leads to small changes in the aggregate labor supply, but is increasingly costly for the g..

Past research has documented that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) impact cognition, education, relationship stability, employment, and earnings. Less research has focused on how these impacts affect measures of long-term economic well-being that capture cumulative disadvantage. This study therefore uses the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 Cohort to investigate the net worth of individuals near the end of their careers, comparing those with and without ACEs. The study uses a Blinder-Oaxaca Decomposition to investigate the underlying mechanisms for any group differences. The findings suggest that observed differences in education, marital instability, and lifetime earnings expla..

We study how exposure of employers to immigrants, both at the market and at the individual firm level, mitigates immigrant-native disparities. We use administrative employee-employer matched data from Portugal, which provides a unique setting given that it experienced almost no immigration until the early 2000s followed by substantial immigration waves. Focusing on the evolution of market wages across successive immigration cohorts, we find that increased employer exposure to immigrant groups can account for up to 25% of the wage convergence between immigrants and natives over the last two decades. We also document that individual-level exposure of firms to immigrants plays an important role..

How to allocate college seats across regions is an important yet largely neglected issue. It may imply a policy tradeoff between efficiency in aggregate human capital production and equality of opportunities for people growing up in different places. Furthermore, the flow of college attendance, resulting from the geography of college seats, also impacts the spatial distribution of skilled workers through post-college migration and regional inequality in future development. This paper studies this tradeoff between efficiency and multidimensional inequality in the spatial allocation of college seats by focusing on the province-based college admission quotas in China, the largest college market..

We analyse the individual productivity effects of Italy's ban on ChatGPT, a generative pretrained transformer chatbot. We compile data on the daily coding output quantity and quality of over 36, 000 GitHub users in Italy and other European countries and combine these data with the sudden announcement of the ban in a difference-in-differences framework. Among the affected users in Italy, we find a short-term increase in output quantity and quality for less experienced users and a decrease in productivity on more routine tasks for experienced users.

Global innovation and entrepreneurship has traditionally been dominated by a handful of high-income countries, especially the US. This paper investigates the international consequences of the rise of a new hub for innovation, focusing on the dramatic growth of high-potential entrepreneurship and venture capital in China. First, using comprehensive data on global venture activities, we show that as the Chinese venture industry rose in importance, entrepreneurship increased substantially in other emerging markets, particularly in sectors dominated by Chinese companies. Using a broad set of country-level economic indicators, we find that this effect was driven by country-sector pairs most simil..

Ethnic inequalities are pervasive in the higher echelons of organizations. We conducted a field experiment to analyze if there is a glass ceiling for ethnic minorities entering leadership positions. We submitted over 12, 000 job applications, to over 4, 000 job advertisements, to investigate hiring discrimination against six ethnic groups for leadership positions. Drawing on implicit leadership theory, we argue that ethnic discrimination is particularly pronounced in the recruitment of leadership positions. Our findings confirm this hypothesis. We find that discrimination increases for leadership positions. Resumes with non-English names receive 57.4% fewer positive responses for leadership ..

We analyse the individual productivity effects of Italy's ban on ChatGPT, a generative pretrained transformer chatbot. We compile data on the daily coding output quantity and quality of over 36, 000 GitHub users in Italy and other European countries and combine these data with the sudden announcement of the ban in a difference-in-differences framework. Among the affected users in Italy, we find a short-term increase in output quantity and quality for less experienced users and a decrease in productivity on more routine tasks for experienced users.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the integration of unpaid care-giving in the household into short- and long-term macroeconomic theory and, in particular, the theoretical structure of production on the supply-side of the economy. The ambition of the project is to furnish a general theoretical representation of how unpaid care giving and its (gendered) social structure contributes to the technical conditions of production in the sphere of marketed output. In so doing, it aims to provide macro theorists with an apparatus that allows consistent description of both short-term (levels of activity) and long-term (rates of growth) macro outcomes in a manner that routinely integrates fe..

As a new work style remote work has become an increasingly important factor for firms and their employees. Employees potentially benefit from a higher flexibility when working remotely. Firms can make use of this non-financial benefit to increase their attractiveness on the job market and to substitute financial wage payments to the employees. However, working remotely offers chances for the employees to engage in unproductive activities at the cost of productive working time. Hence, firms need to trade off the benefits against the costs in order to decide which degree of remote work is optimal. We use an agency model to examine the optimal degree of remote work and its interaction with the ..

We examine who bears the costs of mandated workplace pension programs, exploiting the quasi-experimental rollout of automatic enrollment in the UK. Total compensation (take-home pay plus employer contributions) increases, driven by employer contributions, while the amount of take-home pay decreases. These effects differ by employer size, with take-home pay declining to an extent in the largest firms that we can rule out a pass-through to employees of more than 47%, significantly less than in smaller firms. Our findings provide the first evidence that large employers shift the cost of mandated automatic enrollment onto employees.

This paper analyses changes in the speed of labour demand for new hires in response to the lockdowns that were repeatedly put in place to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. It tests whether the uncertainty-reducing effect of similar lockdowns occurring in quick succession increased the responsiveness of the labour market, thereby allowing for more rapid adjustment, both at the beginning and at the end of subsequent lockdowns. It uses high-frequency online job-posting data and applies an event study approach to the beginning of three national lockdowns and the subsequent reopening in Austria between 2020 and 2022. In view of the importance of progress in vaccination for labour marke..

Using firm employer-employee matched data, we document changes in wage inequality in Japan from 1995 to 2013. We find that between-firm logwage variance rose and led to the rise in the overall logwage variance for male full-time workers, while within-firm logwage variance remain unchanged. The rise of between-firm variance is driven by changes in returns based on firms’ technology and other characteristics, firm fixed effects, and the entry and exit of firms. By contrast, changes in the distribution of observed firm characteristics and returns to human capital had little effect on the between-firm logwage variance.

This study bridges the gap between the urban wage premium and human capital externalities. Merging the worker-level microdata with the geographical data in Mexico and taking the two-step approach of the Mincer wage equation, this study finds that the spatial sorting and human capital externalities entirely explain the urban wage premium in Mexico. This study finds heterogeneous effects of human capital externalities on wages between high- and low-skilled workers. Low-skilled workers benefit from human capital externalities, whereas high-skilled workers do not. Instead, high-skilled workers get more than twice as high private return to education anywhere they work as low-skilled workers.