In Chapter 1, I combine longitudinal administrative firm-level data from Germany with 8,000 local tax changes for identification to show that local tax hikes (cuts) increase (decrease) the local manufacturing share. Firm-level results reveal that this is due to wage, employment, firm entry, and labor productivity in the service sector being more responsive to a tax shock than in manufacturing. With this evidence in mind, I calibrate a two-sector model with heterogeneous firms and profit tax to show that, owing to different structural parameters, a corporate tax cut disproportionately benefits service firms, contributing to the sectoral reallocation from manufacturing to service. In Chapter 2, we derive a European Herfindahl-Hirschman concentration index from 15 micro-aggregated country datasets. We show that European concentration rose due to a reallocation of economic activity towards large and concentrated industries. Over the same period, productivity gains from an increasing allocative efficiency of the European market accounted for 50% of European productivity growth while markups stayed constant. Using country-industry variation, we show that changes in concentration are positively associated with changes in productivity and allocative efficiency. This holds across most sectors and countries and supports the notion that rising concentration in Europe reflects a more efficient market environment rather than weak competition and rising market power. In chapter 3, We study the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and related policy support on productivity. We employ an extensive micro-distributed exercise to access otherwise unavailable individual data on firm performance and government subsidies. Our cross-country evidence for five EU countries shows that the pandemic led to a significant short-term decline in aggregate productivity and the direct support to firms had only a limited positive effect on productivity developments.

We document and dissect a new stylized fact about firm growth: the shift from labor to intermediate inputs. This shift occurs in input quantities, cost and output shares, and output elasticities. We establish this fact using German firm-level data and replicate it in administrative firm data from 11 additional countries. We also document these patterns in micro-aggregated industry data for 20 European countries (and, with respect to industry cost shares, for the US). We rationalize this novel regularity within a parsimonious model featuring (i) an elasticity of substitution between intermediates and labor that exceeds unity, and (ii) an increasing shadow price of labor relative to intermediates, due to monopsony power over labor or labor adjustment costs. The shift from labor to intermediates accounts for one half to one third of the decline in the labor share in growing firms (the remainder is due to wage markdowns and markups) and rationalizes most of the labor share decline in growing industries.

We document and dissect a new stylized fact about firm growth: the shift from labor to intermediate inputs. This shift occurs in input quantities, cost and output shares, and output elasticities. We establish this fact using German firm-level data and replicate it in administrative firm data from 11 additional countries. We also document these patterns in micro-aggregated industry data for 20 European countries (and, with respect to industry cost shares, for the US). We rationalize this novel regularity within a parsimonious model featuring (i) an elasticity of substitution between intermediates and labor that exceeds unity, and (ii) an increasing shadow price of labor relative to intermediates, due to monopsony power over labor or labor adjustment costs. The shift from labor to intermediates accounts for one half to one third of the decline in the labor share in growing firms (the remainder is due to wage markdowns and markups) and rationalizes most of the labor share decline in growing industries.

We analyse the impact of robot adoption on employment composition using novel micro data on robot use in German manufacturing plants linked with social security records and data on job tasks. Our task-based model predicts more favourable employment effects for the least routine-task intensive occupations and for young workers, with the latter being better at adapting to change. An event-study analysis of robot adoption confirms both predictions. We do not find adverse employment effects for any occupational or age group, but churning among low-skilled workers rises sharply. We conclude that the displacement effect of robots is occupation biased but age neutral, whereas the reinstatement effect is age biased and benefits young workers most.