Expertise at Work: New Technologies, New Skills, and Worker Impacts
joint with Cäcilia vom Baur and Anna Salomons, ZEW Discussion Paper, MIT Working Paper, link to latest version (under review)
Log Daily Wage Impacts of Curriculum Updates, by Technology Exposure  | We study how new digital technology reshapes vocational training and skill acquisition and its impact on workers' careers. We construct a novel database of legally binding training curricula and changes therein, spanning the near universe of vocational training in Germany over five decades, and link curriculum updates to breakthrough technologies using Natural Language Processing techniques. Our findings reveal that technological advances drive training updates, with curriculum content evolving towards less routine intensive tasks, and greater use of digital and social skills. Using administrative employer-employee data, we show that educational updates help workers adapt to new demands for their expertise, and earn higher wages compared to workers with outdated skills. These findings highlight the role of changes in within-occupational skill supply in meeting evolving labor market demands for non-college educated workers. |
Minimum Wages and the Rise in Solo Self-Employment
joint with Terry Gregory and Angelika Ganserer, IZA Discussion Paper 15283. (R&R ILR Review)
Effect of Minimum Wages on Solo Self-Employment | We show that the first-time adoption of minimum wages in German industries led to an increase in the share of solo self-employment by up to 8.1 percentage points within a quasi-experimental setting. We explain this result with the cost shock, which led to reduced labor demand and wages for dependent employment, while at the same time creating incentives for independent employment. Our results suggest that dependent employees have been involuntarily pushed into solo self-employment. As a consequence, these workers experience more precarious employment with poorer social security and lower incomes. Such unintended side effects are likely to occur when the minimum wage is set extraordinarily high, especially during an economic downturn. |
De-routinization in the Fourth Industrial Revolution – Firm-Level Evidence
joint with Melanie Arntz, Sabrina Genz, Terry Gregory, and Florian Lehmer, IZA Discussion Paper 16740 (R&R JEBO)
Decomposition of task changes in 4.0 technology adopters | This paper examines the extent to which aggregate-level de-routinization can be attributed to firm-level technology adoption during the most recent technological expansion. We use administrative data and a novel firm survey to distinguish frontier technologies from older technologies. We find that adopters of frontier technologies contribute substantially to de-routinization. However, this is driven only by a subset of these firms: large adopters replace routine jobs and less routine-intensive adopters experience faster growth. These scale and composition effects reflect firms’ readiness to adopt and implement frontier technologies. Our results suggest that an acceleration of technology adoption would be associated with faster de-routinization and an increase in between-firm heterogeneity. |
Outsourcing Mitigates Employment Responses to Trade Shocks
joint with Marco de Pinto, HdBA Discussion Paper 24-03 (under review)
This paper finds that firms respond to trade shocks by changing outsourcing more than labor, adjusting their labor-to-outsourcing ratio, and thus mitigating potential employment consequences of trade. High labor adjustment costs may serve as an explanation in the short run, but we find that these effects are persistent. We develop a theoretical framework to show which properties production functions must fulfill to explain these effects and show that these conditions are met in our data. The shape of the production technology can explain why outsourcing persistently mitigates employment consequences of trade shocks.