Pillars Report
Labor market developments such as globalization, structural transformation, and accelerating technological change can lead to mismatches between firms’ skill demand and employees’ skill supply. While skill mismatch is heavily discussed in research and policy, empirical evidence on the existence and determinants of skill mismatch in Europe is very scarce. In this paper, we develop novel measures of skill mismatch in Europe to address various questions of high relevance for labor market policies in the European Union: (1) How prevalent is skill mismatch in Europe?
CESifo Working Paper No. 10026
Immigration is one of the most divisive political issues in many countries today. Competing narratives, circulated via the media, are crucial in shaping how immigrants’ role in society is perceived. We propose a new method combining advanced natural language processing tools with dictionaries to identify sentences containing one or more of seven immigrant narrative themes and assign a sentiment to each of these. Our narrative dataset covers 107,428 newspaper articles from 70 German newspapers over the 2000 to 2019 period.
EconPol Forum 23 (5), 43-47
In B. Wawrzyniak & M. Herter (ed.), Neue Dimensionen in Data Science (Chapter 20, p. 227-242). Wichmann Fachmedien Berlin - Offenbach.
We analyze the prevalence of working from home (WfH) in Germany using more than 35 million online job advertisements from 2014 to 2021. While the option to work from home was rare in job advertisements before the coronavirus crisis, the shock of the pandemic led to a boom. At the same time, regional, occupational, and sectoral inequalities in access to WfH have decreased during the pandemic. We also document a higher demand for digital skills, teamwork, and adaptability in job ads with a WfH option.
Regional Studies, Forthcoming special issue: The dark side of innovation and its geography.
As regions evolve, their economies become more complex, and they tend to diversify into related activities. Although there is a bright side to this diversification process in terms of economic development, there may also be a dark side to it, as it possibly contributes to regional inequalities. The paper uses data on industries and patents to analyse the diversification patterns of 283 regions in 32 European countries over the past 15 years. We find that only the most economically advanced regions have the opportunity to diversify into highly complex activities.
Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) 22-16, Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography
The literature has shown that related diversification in more complex industries enhances economic growth in regions but also inter-regional inequality. However, it has drawn little attention to the relationship between industrial dynamics (i.e. the rise and fall of industries) and intra-regional wage inequality.
Pillars Report
We study the effects of technological change on immigration flows as well as the labor market outcomes of migrants versus natives. We analyse and compare the effects of two different automation technologies: Industrial robots and artificial intelligence. We exploit data provided by the Industrial Federation of Robotics as well as online job vacancy data on Germany, a highly automated economy and the main destination for migrants in Europe.
CESifo Working Paper No.9758
In this paper, we present theory and global evidence on how mobile internet access affects desire and plans to emigrate. Our theory predicts that mobile internet access increases desire and plans to emigrate. Our empirical analysis combines survey data on 617,402 individuals from 2,120 subnational districts in 112 countries with data on worldwide 3G mobile internet rollout from 2008 to 2018. We show that an increase in mobile internet access increases the desire and plans to emigrate. Instrumenting 3G rollout with pre-existing 2G infrastructure suggests that the effects are causal.
CESifo Working Paper No. 9703
When workers are displaced from their jobs in mass layoffs or firm closures, they experience lasting adverse labor market consequences. We study how these consequences vary with the amount of skill mismatch that workers experience when returning to the labor market. Using novel measures of skill redundancy and skill shortage, we analyze individuals' work histories in Germany between 1975 and 2010. We estimate difference-in-differences models, using a sample in which we match displaced workers to statistically similar non-displaced workers.
Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 31, Issue 3, June 2022, Pages 811–837
This paper aims at revisiting the empirical evidence on the recent trends of countries’ integration in global value chains (GVCs) in Europe. It investigates two potential sources of unbalances that these processes might relate to (i) the sectoral specialization of the patterns of international fragmentation, whether high-technology manufacturing or knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), and (ii) the occupational categories that have benefited or been penalized by these trends.
CESifo Working Paper No.9444
This paper analyses the evidence of job polarization in developing and emerging economies. We carry out an extensive literature review, revealing that job polarization in these countries is only incipient compared to other advanced economies. We then examine the possible moderating aspects explaining this job polarization paradox.
CESifo Working Paper No. 9438
This paper provides empirical evidence on the complex role played by technology in affecting the relationship between the participation of EU countries and industries in Global Value Chains (GVCs) and their employment structure over the period 2000-2014. The empirical analysis is based on country/industry level data for 21 EU countries on employment, trade in value added, patents and investments in intangible assets, and focusses on backward linkages within GVCs.