Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees. Using data on the population of firms between 2002 and 2007 period, we structurally estimate the key parameters of our model to construct counterfactual size, productivity and welfare distributions. With flexible wages, the deadweight loss of the regulation is below 1% of GDP, but when wages are downwardly rigid welfare losses exceed 5%. We also show, regardless of wage flexibility, that the main losers from the regulation are workers (and to a lesser extent large firms) and the main winners are small firms.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Using several sources, we construct a data set of robot purchases by French manufacturing firms and study the firm-level implications of robot adoption. Out of 55,390 firms in our sample, 598 have adopted robots between 2010 and 2015, but these firms account for 20% of manufacturing employment and value added. Consistent with theory, robot adopters experience significant declines in labor share and the share of production workers in employment, and increases in value added and productivity. They expand their overall employment as well. However, this expansion comes at the expense of their competitors (as automation reduces their relative costs). We show that the overall impact of robot adoption on industry employment is negative. We further document that the impact of robots on overall labor share is greater than their firm-level effects because robot adopters are larger and grow faster than their competitors.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Trade in intermediate inputs allows firms to lower their costs of production by using better, cheaper, or novel inputs from abroad. Quantifying the aggregate impact of input trade, however, is challenging. As importing firms differ markedly in how much they buy in foreign markets, results based on aggregate models do not apply. We develop a methodology to quantify the gains from input trade for a class of firm-based models of importing. We derive a sufficiency result: the change in consumer prices induced by input trade is fully determined from the joint distribution of value added and domestic expenditure shares in material spending across firms. We provide a simple formula that can be readily evaluated given the micro-data. In an application to French data, we find that consumer prices of manufacturing products would be 27% higher in the absence of input trade.