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...

This paper develops a general-equilibrium model of skill-biased technological change that approximates the observed shifts in the shares of wage and non-wage income going to the top decile of U.S. households since 1980. Under realistic assumptions, we find that all agents can benefit from the...

We investigate the diffusion of frontier technologies across German firms before and during the Covid-19 crisis. Our analysis tracks the nature, timing, and pandemic-related motivations behind technology investments, using tailor-made longitudinal survey data linked to administrative...

Using European Commission real-time data, we show that potential output (PO) estimates were substantially and persistently revised downwards after the Great Recession. We decompose PO revisions into revisions of the capital stock, trend labor, and trend total-factor productivity (TFP)....

The argument that policy risk, i.e., uncertainty about monetary and fiscal policy, has been holding back the economic recovery in the U.S. during the Great Recession has a large popular appeal. We analyze the role of policy risk in explaining business cycle fluctuations by using an estimated New...

The "Great Recession" resulted in many business closings and foreclosures, but what effect did it have on business formation? On the one hand, recessions decrease potential business income and wealth, but on the other hand they restrict opportunities in the wage/salary sector leaving the net...

Since the 1970s, exports and imports of manufactured goods have been the engine of international trade and much of that trade relies on container shipping. This paper introduces a new monthly index of the volume of container trade to and from North America. Incorporating this index into a...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...

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...

This paper analyses monthly hours worked in the US over the sample period 1939m1 - 2011m10 using a cyclical long memory model; this is based on Gegenbauer processes and characterised by autocorrelations decaying to zero cyclically and at a hyperbolic rate along with a spectral density that is...