Automation and Job Polarization: On the Decline of Middling Occupations in Europe

Using data from 10 Western European countries, I provide evidence that the fall in prices of information technologies (IT) is associated with a lower share of employment in middle‐wage occupations and a higher share of employment in high wage occupations in industries which depend more on IT relative to industries which depend less. Similar results hold within gender and age groups, with notable differences in these groups. For instance, the share of employment in high wage occupations among males has increased less than among females with the fall in IT prices.     

LIML estimation of import demand and export supply elasticities

I apply limited-information maximum likelihood (LIML) to estimate import demand and export supply elasticities for a range of eurozone countries. The results highlight inconsistencies in the parameters estimated by LIML relative to an estimator that is robust to heteroskedasticity. The nature of the structural equations reveals complications generated by the limiting behavior of the parameters that can be replicated in finite samples. The results of simulations underscore improvements in parameter estimates in a three-dimensional panel, suggesting that the problem of limiting behaviour can be overcome in larger dataset/panels.     

The Impact of Telecommunication Technologies on Competition in Services and Goods Markets: Empirical Evidence

In this paper, we empirically show that a more intensive use and wider adoption of telecommunication technologies significantly increases the level of product market competition in services and goods markets. Our results are consistent with the view that the use of telecommunication technologies can lower the costs of entry and search. These findings are robust to various measures of competition and a wide range of specification checks.     

Public debt and relative prices in a cross-section of countries

This paper examines the effects of debt and distortionary labor taxation on the long-run behavior of the relative price of nontraded goods. At the theoretical level, in a two-sector open economy model we demonstrate that higher public debt, associated with higher taxation, contracts labor supply in both traded and nontraded goods sectors. Relative prices move inversely with relative supply shifts which, in turn, depend on relative factor intensities. At the empirical level, for a panel of advanced economies, we find statistically significant effects of public debt and taxes on the relative price of nontraded goods, with higher debt and taxes associated with higher relative prices.     

External Imbalances and the Extensive Margin of Trade

We quantify the role of the extensive margin in the recent trade dynamics of selected countries that are running large and persistent trade imbalances. We find that the role of the extensive margin is quite substantial, although it varies in significance across the countries in the sample. Finally, we highlight differences in behaviour between the fixed‐varieties and varieties‐adjusted terms of trade.