Immigration has become a central driver of U.S. labor force growth. We document new empirical findings that shed light on the relationships between immigration, labor shortages, wage growth, and job openings during the high-immigration period of 2021-2024. The textbook search-and-matching model...

The H-1B program lets firms hire high-skill foreign workers for a six-year term. The annual number of visas allocated to for-profit firms is capped at 85,000 and there is excess demand for those visas. The analysis merges administrative data, including the I-129 petitions that report the wage...

This paper investigates the determinants and dynamics of labour demand and specifically informal labour in Egypt's manufacturing sector, using nationally representative firm-level data from the 2020/21 Egyptian Industrial Firm Behavior Survey. Applying ordinary least squares and fractional logit...

Using 1980-2019 Danish matched employer-employee data, we unpack the rise in wage sorting - the correlation between worker and firm wage fixed effects (Abowd et al., 1999) - from 0.06 to 0.18. The rise is driven entirely by reallocation of employment from persistently low-sorting to persistently...

This paper investigates how competition for skilled labour from foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) affects the alignment of wages and labour productivity in domestic firms. Using linked employer- employee records, worker data, and firm-level customs declarations from South Africa,...

We quantify the contribution of firm-level technological change to skill demand and aggregate inequality in the presence of imperfect competition in the labor market. We show that skill-biased technological change increases both the firm-level skill ratio and the skill premium, while other...

This study investigates the effects of changes in job-filling and job-separation rates on economic fluctuations using an efficiency wage model. It introduces a relationship between labor input and the strategic labor input target into the model. This framework enables us to analyze situations in...

This paper studies how employment subsidies for start-ups shape their performance. We exploit an unexpected policy reform in Belgium that permanently exempted start-ups hiring their first employee from payroll taxes for that employee. Using firm-level administrative data and a...

Monetary policy asymmetrically affects the response of firms' employment to an output shock and plays a role in cushioning employment adjustment over the business cycle. Combining annual firmlevel data until 2020 with quarterly firm-level data until 2023 and highfrequency monetary policy...

This study examines how automation, measured by industrial robot adoption and artificial intelligence (AI) exposure, is associated with labor market and production outcomes across Europe. Using a panel dataset covering 32 European countries and 18 industries from 1994 to 2019, we analyze the...

This paper studies how employment subsidies for start-ups shape their performance. We exploit an unexpected policy reform in Belgium that permanently exempted start-ups hiring their first employee from payroll taxes for that employee. Using firm-level administrative data and a...

We show that the age composition of employment within Swedish employers shifts after the arrival of generative AI, with no corresponding reduction in aggregate labour demand. Using 4.6 million job advertisements from Sweden’s largest recruitment platform, we find that the broad decline in...

Non-traditional platform work has grown rapidly in the Philippines amid technological change and longstanding labor-market constraints. Using nationally representative data from the 2025 Jobs and Skills Survey (JSS), this study provides a detailed profile of workers engaged in these emerging...

Brand capital - an intangible asset that differentiates a firm's products - has grown in recent decades, alongside the rise of intangible investments and the decline in the labor share. Trademarks are legal claims on brand capital and are actively traded across firms, providing a setting to...

How does firms' skill demand change as the business landscape evolves? We present evidence from the green transition by analyzing how hurricanes impact demand for green skills. These disasters signal the risks of not acting on environmental issues. We use data from U.S. online job postings...

Belgium's 2016 payroll tax exemption for first-time employers triggered a sharp increase in firms hiring their first worker but little growth among larger firms. To account for this pattern, we develop and estimate a directed search model - with discrete hiring, firm heterogeneity, and...

This paper examines the circumstances under which firms facilitate occupational transitions, complementing prior work that focuses on workers' decisions. We link unemployment insurance records with application diaries and clickstream data from a recruitment platform to causally assess how...

This paper studies how employment subsidies for start-ups shape their performance. We exploit an unexpected policy reform in Belgium that permanently exempted start-ups hiring their first employee from payroll taxes for that employee. Using firm-level administrative data and a...

We analyze how value added taxes (VATs) affect labor market outcomes (firms' employee costs, wages, hours worked, employment). While VATs are designed to tax consumption, they are levied at the firm level, which creates potential spillovers to labor markets. We hypothesize that VATs affect wages...

We analyze how value added taxes (VATs) affect labor market outcomes (firms' employee costs, wages, hours worked, employment). While VATs are designed to tax consumption, they are levied at the firm level, which creates potential spillovers to labor markets. We hypothesize that VATs affect wages...

• Occupations that are highly cognitive, non-physical, and low in social interaction - typically higher-skill white-collar roles such as data analysts, software developers, and translators - turn out to be highly AI-exposed • Occupations requiring manual dexterity or intensive interpersonal...

This paper investigates Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption and its labour market consequences among UK small and medium enterprises, using novel data from the British Chambers of Commerce Business Outlook Survey, collected in early 2026. AI adoption is increasingly widespread, with over half...

This paper examines the impact of automation investments on employment dynamics and workforce composition using administrative data from Portugal. I exploit the lumpiness of automation imports in a difference-in-differences event study design. My results show that automation creates jobs in...

Bangladesh has made notable developmental progress over the past two decades. Economic growth has been among the top 10 percent globally, and poverty has been reduced by 80 percent over the same period. Exports also saw a dramatic jump from US 6.5 billion dollars in 2000 to US 57.5 billion...

We evaluate the influence on the skill premium of the task content of jobs by exploiting the text data from online job ads covering 2009-2018 (over 189,000 ads) published by one of the leading Chilean online job portals (www.trabajando.com). Our analysis tests the expected complementarity...

Labour shortages in Europe have led firms to adopt two key strategies: automation and the employment of migrants. This study empirically examines the relationship between robot adoption and immigrant labour (differentiated by region of origin and education level) in Austrian firms using a novel...

We partner with a Public Employment Service to examine whether jobseekers can be encouraged to reskill for shortage occupations. In a large-scale field experiment involving 100,000 recently unemployed individuals, we provide information on shortage occupations and related training opportunities....

We partner with a Public Employment Service to examine whether jobseekers can be encouraged to reskill for shortage occupations. In a large-scale field experiment involving 100,000 recently unemployed individuals, we provide information on shortage occupations and related training opportunities....

Do employers seek to attract individuals with more education because it enhances human capital or because it signals higher levels of pre-existing traits? We experimentally vary master's degree completion rates on applicant résumés and examine how this influences candidates' desirability and...

Using register data, we document that the average German labor market, defined by hires in combinations of 3-digit occupations, requirement levels, and commuting zones, is highly concentrated (HHI=0.257). By EU antitrust thresholds, 56 percent of these labor markets feature moderate or high...

Do employers seek to attract individuals with more education because it enhances human capital or because it signals higher levels of pre-existing traits? We experimentally vary master’s degree completion rates on applicant résumés and examine how this influences candidates’ desirability...

Do employers seek to attract individuals with more education because it enhances human capital or because it signals higher levels of pre-existing traits? We experimentally vary master's degree completion rates on applicant r'esum'es and examine how this influences candidates' desirability and...