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We propose to study worker and firm views on and willingness to pay for the expansion of job loss insurance in Ethiopia. Job loss insurance consists of payments given to workers after job loss. We propose to interview a representative sample of firms and their workers in the capital city of Addis Ababa, the economic hub of the country.

We measure the contribution of firm-embedded productivity to cross-country income differences. By firm-embedded productivity we refer to firm-specific components of productivity, such as blueprints, management practices, and other intangible capital. Using micro-level data for multinational enterprises (MNEs), we compare market shares of the same MNE in different countries and document that they are systematically larger in less developed countries. This indicates that MNEs face less competition and that firm-embedded productivity is scarce in these countries. We implement a measure of firm-embedded productivity based on this observation. Differences in firm-embedded productivity account for one-third of the cross-country variance in output per worker in our sample.

This project studies the growing importance of high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) in private capital markets. While the role of institutional investors in private markets has already been studied, little attention has been paid to the participation of HNWI in these markets.

The project aims to shed new light on why public support for carbon taxes is so low, despite the crucial role that many economists and environmental campaigners believe they could play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change.

Generous maternity leave, affordable daycare, extensive social safety nets, excellent universal health care, and high-quality public schools, are all notable features of Nordic countries. There is a widespread belief that such strong public investments in children contribute to a levelled playing field and promote social mobility. However, gaps in learning outcomes between children of rich and poor parents remain as high in Nordic countries as elsewhere in Europe. One explanation for this paradox is that the equalizing impacts of public investments are undone by parental investments in children of rich and poor families, which are as unequal in Nordic countries as in the rest of the European continent.

This paper studies the extent to which the cyclicality of occupational mobility shapes that of aggregate unemployment and its duration distribution. We document the relation between workers' occupational mobility and unemployment duration over the long run and business cycle.

The wider agenda that this grant is part of will contribute to this debate by studying the determinants of access to justice for employment disputes in Brazil.

Using detailed household-level data from Malawi on physical quantities of agricultural outputs and inputs, we measure farm total factor productivity (TFP), controlling for land quality, rain, and transitory shocks. We find that operated land size and capital are essentially unrelated to farm TFP, implying substantial factor misallocation. The agricultural output gain from a reallocation of factors to their efficient use among existing farmers is a factor between 1.7- and 2.8-fold. We provide suggestive evidence connecting misallocation with the extent of land markets and illustrate how an efficient allocation via rental markets can substantially reduce agricultural income inequality and poverty.

This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant's marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. We find most manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown of 1.53, implying a worker earning only 65 cents on the marginal dollar generated. To investigate long-term trends for the entire sector, we propose a novel, theoretically grounded measure for the aggregate markdown. We find that it decreased between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, but has been sharply increasing since.

We quantify precisely the wealth redistribution generated by the current inflation shock in the US and we look at macroeconomic models with heterogenous agents (HANK) which typically feature households immediately adjusting to macroeconomic shocks (e.g. a rise in interest rates).