We provide empirical evidence that strong dismissal laws appear to have a positive effect on the innovative pursuits of firms and their employees. Stringent labor laws provide firms a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby spur their employees to pursue value-enhancing...

We study how firm-specific complementary assets and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results show when a firm will wish to sue workers that leave with innovative ideas, and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We...

A fast-growing literature shows that technological change is replacing labor in routine tasks, raising concerns that labor is racing against the machine. This paper is the first to estimate the labor demand effects of routine-replacing technological change (RRTC) for Europe as a whole and at the...

This paper studies the effects of investment tax credits on firms’ input choices by exploitinga sudden shift in the tax credit rate by firm size for manufacturing firms in Germany in 1999. I find that more generous tax credits lead to a significant increase in both investment and employment,...

A fast-growing literature shows that digital technologies are displacing labor from routine tasks, raising concerns that labor is racing against the machine. We develop a task-based framework to estimate the aggregate labor demand and employment effects of routine-replacing technological change...

A fast-growing literature shows that digital technologies are displacing labor from routine tasks, raising concerns that labor is racing against the machine. We develop a task-based framework to estimate the aggregate labor demand and employment effects of routine-replacing technological change...

Stringent labor laws can provide firms a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby spur their employees to pursue value-enhancing innovative activities. Using patents and citations as proxies for innovation, we identify this effect by exploiting the time-series variation...