We study the impact of techies-engineers and other technically trained workers-on firm-level productivity. We first report new facts on the role of techies in the firm by leveraging French administrative data and unique surveys. Techies are STEM-skill intensive and are associated with...

We study the effects of a voluntary skill certification scheme in an online freelancing labour market. We show that obtaining skill certificates increases freelancers' earnings. This effect is not driven by increased freelancer productivity but by decreased employer uncertainty. The increase in...

For emerging professions, such as jobs in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or sustainability (green), labour supply does not meet industry demand. In this scenario of labour shortages, our work aims to understand whether employers have started focusing on individual skills rather than...

The canonical supply-demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely influential; however, it has faced several important challenges. Several studies show that the standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities of substitution, yields counterintuitive...

Since 1980, economic growth in the U.S. has been fastest in its largest cities. We show that a group of skill- and information-intensive service industries are responsible for all of this new urban bias in recent growth. We then propose a simple explanation centered around the interaction of...

What are the earnings and employment losses that workers suffer when demand for their occupations declines? To answer this question we combine forecasts on occupational employment changes, which allow us to identify unanticipated declines; administrative data on the population of Swedish...

This paper studies the consequences of the buildup of a new economic sector-the Norwegian petroleum industry-on investment in human capital. We assess both short-term and long-term effects for a broad set of educational margins, by comparing individuals in regions exposed to the new sector with...

This paper brings together the modern literatures on monopsony power and labor unions by empirically examining the effects of unionization on the dynamics of worker earnings across differently concentrated markets. Exploiting tax reforms to union due deductions as exogenous shocks to...

This paper analyses the evidence of job polarization in developing countries. We carry out an extensive review of the existing empirical literature and examine the primary data sources and measures of routine intensity. The synthesis of results suggests that job polarization in emerging...

This paper studies how linear tax and education policy should optimally respond to skill-biased technical change (SBTC). SBTC affects optimal taxes and subsidies by changing i) direct distributional benefits, ii) indirect redistributional effects due to wage-(de)compression, and iii) education...