Research

This paper studies how population aging affects aggregate labor productivity through changes in the workforce skill mix. Aging raises accumulated experience, but it can also reduce the relative supply of current-technology skills that are more common among younger cohorts and important for technology adoption.

Using matched employer-employee data and establishment surveys from Germany, we show that firms with younger workforces are more likely to adopt advanced digital and automation technologies. After adoption, employment expands disproportionately through younger hires, who also report larger productivity gains from the new technologies.

Motivated by this evidence, we develop a model of firm dynamics with labor-market frictions and multidimensional worker skills. Experience accumulates on the job, current-technology skills can depreciate and be rebuilt through training, and firms choose whether to adopt frontier technologies. We use the model to quantify how aging changes firm dynamics and aggregate productivity and to evaluate policies that shape workforce skills.

We study how advanced-technology adoption and venture-capital funding interact to shape firm employment and growth. Using U.S. Census Bureau microdata, we find that each is positively associated with firm outcomes, while their combination is especially consequential. Venture capital is concentrated among a small set of firms with large post-funding employment gains; advanced technologies are adopted more broadly and are followed by smaller average employment increases. We discipline a startup model with the firm-level evidence to quantify reallocation and the effects of taxes and subsidies.

Presented at the ASSA Meetings (2026), SED Conference (2025), Midwest Macroeconomics Meetings (2025), and Keio University (2024).

We study technology adoption in a labor market with search frictions, where worker training raises the productivity gains from adopting a new technology. Because trained workers acquire transferable skills, firms can benefit from training investments made by others. This free-riding problem delays both adoption and training. We apply the model to the diffusion of enterprise resource planning systems in Portugal and show that firms train fewer workers upon adoption as the technology becomes more widespread, consistent with the model’s mechanism. The calibrated model implies sizable output losses from underinvestment in adoption and training.

Presented at the Rome Ph.D. in Economics and Finance Conference at LUISS University (2025).

We study how mandatory wage disclosure in job postings changes firms’ wage setting and provision of non-wage amenities. Using New York City’s 2022 pay transparency law and data on job postings and employee reviews, we document a sharp increase in wage disclosure and higher average realized wages, but lower job satisfaction among new hires, particularly for work-life balance. A search model rationalizes these findings through the trade-off between wage transparency, wage equity, and firms’ incentives to provide amenities.

Presented at the Bank of Italy-EIEF Workshop on Applied Microeconomics (2024).