Firm training is widely regarded as crucial for protecting workers from automation, yet there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this belief. Using internationally harmonized data from over 90,000 workers across 37 industrialized countries, we construct an individual-level measure of automation risk based on tasks performed at work. Our analysis reveals substantial within-occupation variation in automation risk, overlooked by existing occupation-level measures. To assess whether firm training mitigates automation risk, we exploit within-occupation and within-industry variation. Additionally, we employ entropy balancing to re-weight workers without firm training based on a rich set of background characteristics, including tested numeracy skills as a proxy for unobserved ability. We find that training reduces workers’ automation risk by 3.8 percentage points, equivalent to 8% of the average automation risk. The training-induced reduction in automation risk accounts for 15% of the wage returns to firm training. Firm training is effective in reducing automation risk and increasing wages across nearly all countries, underscoring the external validity of our findings. Training is similarly effective across gender, age, and education groups, suggesting widely shared benefits rather than gains concentrated in specific demographic segments.

Is there a multicultural neighborhood price premium? We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in British colonization patterns in Northern Ireland during the early 1600s which created neighborhoods of varying religious composition that persists until today. These religious groups are culturally distinct, but are observationally equivalent ethnically and socioeconomically. A standard deviation increase neighborhood-level multiculturalism raises house prices by 9.6%. Multiculturalism raises property prices by increasing asset liquidity and housing demand as a wider spectrum of society demand houses in these areas. The findings and mechanism contrast sharply with prior evidence showing negative relationships due to homophily, social networks, and identification challenges.

We analyze how creditor rights affect the nonsynchronicity of global corporate credit default swap spreads (CDS-NS). CDS-NS is negatively related to the country-level creditor-control rights, especially to the “restrictions on reorganization” component, where creditor-shareholder conflicts are high. The effect is concentrated in firms with high investment intensity, asset growth, information opacity, and risk. Pro-creditor bankruptcy reforms led to a decline in CDS-NS, indicating lower firm-specific idiosyncratic information being priced in credit markets. A strategic-disclosure incentive among debtors avoiding creditor intervention seems more dominant than the disciplining effect, suggesting how strengthening creditor rights affects power rebalancing between creditors and shareholders.

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.

Firm training is widely regarded as crucial for protecting workers from automation, yet there is a lack of empirical evidence to support this belief. Using internationally harmonized data from over 90,000 workers across 37 industrialized countries, we construct an individual-level measure of automation risk based on tasks performed at work. Our analysis reveals substantial within-occupation variation in automation risk, overlooked by existing occupation-level measures. To assess whether firm training mitigates automation risk, we exploit within-occupation and within-industry variation. Additionally, we employ entropy balancing to re-weight workers without firm training based on a rich set of background characteristics, including tested numeracy skills as a proxy for unobserved ability. We find that training reduces workers’ automation risk by 3.8 percentage points, equivalent to 8% of the average automation risk. The training-induced reduction in automation risk accounts for 15% of the wage returns to firm training. Firm training is effective in reducing automation risk and increasing wages across nearly all countries, underscoring the external validity of our findings. Training is similarly effective across gender, age, and education groups, suggesting widely shared benefits rather than gains concentrated in specific demographic segments.