With China's 2001 WTO accession, trade costs between the US and China fell sharply, but the transport costs of Chinese imports within the US remained sizable. We argue that domestic transport costs shield local labor markets from globalization. Using a shift-share design for industry-level...

A major question in the globalization debate is whether outsourcing and offshoring activities are beneficial to the home country. This paper investigates the effects on productivity and trade from the perspective of transaction costs, using a recent theory on trade in tasks. A production...

This paper contributes to the productivity literature by using results from firm-level productivity studies to improve forecasts of macro-level productivity growth. The paper employs current research methods on estimating firm-level productivity to build times-series components that capture the...

In this paper we study the allocation of workers over high and low productivity firms in a labor market with coordination frictions. Specifically, we consider a search model where workers can apply to high and or low productivity firms. Firms that compete for the same candidate can increase...

This paper first documents the increase in the time lag with which labor input reacts to output fluctuations (the labor adjustment lag) that is visible in US data since the mid-1980s. We show that a lagged labor adjustment response is optimal in a setting where there is uncertainty about the...

The COVID-19 crisis may have widely and permanently altered the labor market through the demand for skills. Crises tend to accelerate technological change. Previous recent crises were characterized by an acceleration of automation, which generally led to a decrease in middle-income jobs with...

Knowledge triggers regional growth. Evidence suggests that skilled labour force concentrates in islands of innovation, determining an advantage for innovative regions and a challenge for lagging ones. We address the role of knowledge in shaping effective markets for skilled labour. Estimates are...

This paper enters the debate on the islands of innovation through the lens of the standard Lucas (1988) growth model. It begins with a review of the theoretical details of the model and of the ensuing main empirical results, which can be identified when estimating such model on a sample of 261...

This paper investigates the relation between human capital andretirement when the age of retirement is endogenous. This relation isexamined in a life-cycle earnings model. An employee works full timeuntil retirement. The worker accumulates human capital by training-on-the-job and by...

We investigate the manifold posed question: To what extent does investment in human and social capital, besides the effect of talent, enhance entrepreneurial performance? We distinguish between three different performance measures: survival, profits, and generated employment. On the basis of the...