Working Papers & Works in Progress
Working Papers & Works in Progress
For Whom the Bot Tolls: Specialization and the Earnings Effects of AI (with L. Mann) -- Slides available & Draft coming soon!
Who will gain and who will lose from AI-induced task automation? This paper argues that skill specialization is an important part of the answer. In a canonical task-based model, in which occupations bundle tasks and workers possess heterogeneous portfolios of task-specific skills, workers whose skills are concentrated in automated tasks face losses, while automation frees others from performing tasks they were relatively less skilled in. Quantifying these effects requires measuring (i) the exposure of tasks to automation, for which we exploit a direct mapping between our model and prominent exposure measures; (ii) the task content of occupations, which we recover by leveraging advances in natural language processing; and (iii) the multidimensional distribution of skills. We use the model's structure to estimate this skill distribution from data on wages and occupational choices. We show that workers' skill specialization explains empirically salient features of mobility. In a proof-of-concept study guided by empirical exposure measures, we then quantify the dynamic earnings effects of tools that automate data analysis. Our results show that occupation-level outcomes hide substantial individual-level heterogeneity. While selection into occupation based on skill specialization implies that incumbents lose on average, wage declines are concentrated among leavers, whereas stayers win by shifting towards other productive tasks. Meanwhile, workers entering highly exposed occupations benefit from the transformed task composition. Our framework provides a flexible approach for analyzing the distributional impacts across multiple types of automation shocks.
Upcoming presentations: Columbia U, Minneapolis Fed, BSE Summer Forum, SED, SITE, BU
Superstar Teams -- New version! Submitted.
[Latest version (v2.1), incl. Online Appendix | June 2025] [Supplemental Appendix] [Janeway Institute WP 2235 | June 2025]
Econ JM Best Paper Award, European Economic Association/Unicredit Foundation
Companion note "Human Capital at Work: Five Facts about the Role of Skills for Firm Productivity, Growth, and Wage Inequality" (with C. Criscuolo & P. Gal) [OECD WP]
Firms as Foragers (with V. Carvalho)
Supported by a ~£38,000 grant from the Keynes Fund.
Workers, Capitalists, and the Government: Fiscal Policy and Income (Re)Distribution, with C. Cantore
Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 119, pp. 58-74, 2021 [Published version - open access], [Online appendix], [Replication files], [Slides]
A capitalist-worker two-agent New Keynesian model to study the interaction of fiscal policy and household heterogeneity in a tractable environment. The model is consistent with micro data on empirical intertemporal marginal propensities to consume and it avoids implausible profit income effects on labor supply. Relative to the traditional two-agent model, these features imply, respectively, a lower sensitivity of consumption to the composition of public financing; and smaller fiscal multipliers alongside pronounced redistributive effects.
Volatile Hiring: Uncertainty in Search and Matching Models, with W. Den Haan and P. Rendahl
Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 123, pp. 1-18, 2021 [Published version - open access], [Online appendix ], [Replication files], [Short slides | April 2021], [VoxEU column | Sep 2021]
We study the hypothesis that heightened uncertainty leads to higher unemployment because firms prefer to adopt a "wait-and-see" approach to posting vacancies. Contrary to common belief, option-value considerations play no role in the standard search-and matching model with free entry. Constructively, we show that when the mass of entrepreneurs is finite and there is heterogeneity in firm-specific productivity, a rise in perceived uncertainty robustly increases the option value of waiting and reduces job creation.
The Risk-Premium Channel of Uncertainty: Implications for Unemployment and Inflation, with H. Lee and P. Rendahl
Review of Economic Dynamics, Vol. 51, pp. 117-137, 2023 [Online Appendix], [Replication files], [Slides for SITE | Sep 2022], [Cambridge INET Special Feature]
This paper argues that a risk-premium mechanism plays an important tole in the transmission of macroeconomic uncertainty shocks to the labor market. In a quantitative model, this channel accounts for a significant fraction of the uncertainty-induced rise in unemployment, and it implies that uncertainty shocks are less deflationary than regular demand shocks, nor can they be fully neutralized by monetary policy.