Job Market Paper: Can Firm Subsidies Spread Growth? !DRAFT AVAILABLE! (with John Morrow)
How do firms diffuse resources and do they spillover outside headquarter intensive areas? We show R&D subsidies induce French firms to hire new workers, often in new establishments and commuting zones. Using subsidy induced labor demand shocks and past employment patterns, we estimate a within industry spillover elasticity of .26 to non-subsidy firms, rising to .35 for openings outside of headquarter areas. Spillovers are also significant across firm branches and for firms. While subsidies are nominally awarded to headquarters, firms expand to distribute spillovers more broadly.
Working Papers
Family Firms in France: Macro Impact and Micro Insights (with Farid Toubal and Peio Villanueva) We construct a novel dataset that combines administrative and commercial data to examine the economic impact and performances of family-owned firms in France. The dataset covers a large and heterogeneous sample of both listed and privately held groups across different size categories. Our analysis describes that family firms contribute significantly to employment, value added, turnover, and trade. We differentiate between listed and privately held groups and further examine small, medium, and large groups. Family business groups are more productive than non-family groups, especially privately held ones. They offer more permanent contracts but pay lower wages. Internationalization is generally lower, particularly for non-listed groups. Family groups also show better asset efficiency and lower debt ratios, mainly among privately held groups. These findings vary across size categories.
Minimum Wage and Skills: Evidence from Job Vacancy Data (with Mary O’Mahony) Increases in the minimum wage aim to benefit low-wage workers but may lead firms to offset costs by substituting low-skilled labor with higher-skilled workers or adopting new technology. Following a significant and unexpected UK minimum wage hike in 2016, we found a reduced demand for low-educated and high Risk of Automation (ROA) jobs, coupled with an increased demand for technical skills. Using a differencein-differences framework, this paper provides evidence of labor-labor substitution at the low-end of the skill distribution and labor-technology substitution, showing a shift towards jobs requiring advanced technical skills.
Measuring the Impact of Lobbying by Exploiting the Complementarity Between Influence Tools (with Olimpia Cutinelli-Rendina) This paper develops a novel methodological approach to measure the returns of lobbying activity based on pre-established concepts in the literature. Using changes in congressional committee assignments as a source of exogenous variation to lobbying activity, we introduce two key innovations. First, we employ long-run campaign contributions as a proxy for political connections, decoupling them from geographic ties. Second, we consider the topics lobbied by firms as partly endogenous by linking them to firms’ historical political connections. These innovations are supported by three stylized facts demonstrating that firms strategically invest in campaign contributions, recognizing that legislators will eventually enter key committees over time. By leveraging the complementarity between lobbying activity and campaign contributions, we construct a new firm level instrument for lobbying activities. We confirm our methodology by revisiting estimates on the effects of lobbying on firm size, financial performance, and investment decisions, advancing our understanding of the relationship between political engagement and corporate outcomes.
Uncertainty and the COVID-19 crisis: Evidence from online job postings (with C. Criscuolo and M. Squicciarini) The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered large declines in economic activity, impacting different industries, firms and workers in heterogeneous ways. This paper uses Burning Glass Technologies’ online job posting data for the United Kingdom for the period 2019-May 21 to study the impact of the decline in activity and rise in uncertainty related to the pandemic on local labour markets. This paper uses a measure of local labour market exposure to the global pandemic shock. We find that areas that were more exposed saw a larger decline in online job adverts during the crisis. Controlling for demand and supply shocks, rise in global uncertainty has an additional effect on labour markets that needs to be taken into account to quantify the effects of the crisis.
Work In Progress
Business Groups and Innovation (with Ariell Reshef and Farid Toubal)
Innovation in Family Business (with Olimpia Cutinelli Rendina)
Subsidies and Firms (with Farid Toubal)
Pre-doctoral and policy work
The evolution of the association between community level social capital and COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations in the United States (with F. Borgovoni and S.V. Subramanian)
Social Science & Medicine, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113948. The Academic Times.
Bowling together by bowling alone: Social capital and Covid-19 (with F. Borgovoni)
Social Science & Medicine, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113501.
Community-Level Social Capital and COVID-19 Infections and Fatality in the United States (with F. Borgovoni and S.V. Subramanian)
CEPR Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers, issue 32, p. 110-126, 2020, VoxEU.
Bowling together by bowling alone: Social capital and Covid-19 (with F. Borgovoni)
CEPR Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers, issue 17, p. 73-96, 2020, VoxEU, IOE London Blog.
The role of education and skills in bridging the digital gender divide, evidence from APEC countries (with F. Borgovoni, A.S. Liebender and M. Squicciarini), OECD, 2019.
Occupational transitions: the cost of moving to a “safe haven” (with S. Jamet, L. Marcolin and M. Squicciarini)
OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1787/6d3f9bff-en.