Princeton Job Market Candidates in Trade and Related Fields

This year we have an exceptional cohort of six Princeton job market candidates in trade and related fields (in alphabetical order). Seize this opportunity to hire oustanding researchers in these fields!

Adrien Bilal : The Geography of Unemployment Adrien's job market paper shows that the job-losing-rate is responsible for most of the spatial differences in unemployment and develops a dynamic theory of spatial geography that features equilibrium unemployment driven by differences in these rates. A key implication of the model is that firms sort inefficiently in space and placed-based policies can be welfare improving. Adrien has another paper that is a revise and resubmit at Econometrica.

Anders Humlum : Robot Adoption and Labor Market Dynamics Anders's job market paper provides the most convincing evidence to date on the income distributional consequences of robots. The paper combines a reduced-form event study specification and a structural model that makes a methodological contribution in incorporating both dynamic firm technology adoption decisions and dynamic worker occupation choices. These specifications are estimated using rich matched employee-employer data for Denmark. Although the income distributional effects of robots can be alleviated using a robot tax, the paper shows that this policy has a substantial negative effect on aggregate efficiency and real income.

Charly Porcher : Migration with Costly Information Charly's job market paper provides theory and evidence that migration is limited by information frictions. The paper first develops a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model of migration with costly information acquisition and local information sharing modelled using rational inattention. The paper next structurally estimates this model using data on Brazilian commuting zones over time and finds substantial information frictions, which play a quantitatively relevant role in shaping the effects of counterfactual changes in policy.

Hannah Rubinton : The Geography of Skill Biased Technical Change Hannah's job market paper shows that larger cities in the United States have experienced larger increases in the wages and employments of skilled workers relative to unskilled workers than smaller cities and have simultaneously experienced an increase in relative levels of business dynamism. To account for these empirical findings, her paper embeds a model of producer dynamics following Hopenhayn (1992) in a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model. As the larger market size in bigger cities leads to a large fraction of firms to adopt a skill-biased new technology, this increases the relative wages and employment of skilled workers, and bids up the price for land, which in turn increases the productivity threshold below which firms exit, thereby increasing relative rates of firm entry and exit in larger cities.

Rowan Shi : Solving Combinatorial Discrete Choice Problems in Heterogeneous Agent Models: Theory and an Application to Tax Harmonization in the EU Rowan's job market paper develops a new algorithm for solving high-dimensional combinatorial discrete choice problems in heterogeneous agent models. A classic example is a multinational firm's choice of whether to open a plant in each of N locations, a problem with 2^N possible combinations of plant locations for each firm. Her algorithm solves problems of this form in which each agent's payoff is either monotonically increasing or decreasing in its type and either supermodular or submodular in the set of locations. Her empirical application shows how this approach makes feasible an analysis of corporate tax harmonization across the 27 member countries of the European Union (2^27 = 134,217,728 combinations).

Fabian Trottner : Who Gains from Scale? Trade and Wage Inequality Within and Between Firms Fabian's job market paper begins by showing that the employer-size wage premium is systematically larger for more skilled workers. To account for these empirical findings, the paper develops a theoretical model in which firms have a non-homothetic production technology and face upward-sloping supply functions for labor. To distinguish non-homotheticities from heterogeneous production technologies, he structurally estimates this model using matched employee-employer data for Germany. Trade liberalization is shown to substantially raise overall wage inequality, through both between-firm inequality for workers of a given skill and within-firm inequality between workers of different skill.