Skills and Innovation in the Labour Market

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Undertaking the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship will be of enormous benefit for consolidating my PhD research on labour economics. My aims for the Fellowship are to publish the papers from my PhD, and also carry out further limited research for two of my PhD papers. Another objective is to define a comprehensive research agenda for the coming years. For this new agenda I propose to investigate the mechanisms of economic adjustment to a skilled labour supply shock, which has important effects on wages, employment, the evolution of skills and the longer-run comparative advantage of an economy. During my ESRC Fellowship I will communicate the findings from my research to a range of different audiences, thereby building networks with other researchers and developing impact opportunities. For this purpose, I propose to undertake a one-month research visit at the Center for Labor Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the world's best places for research in labour economics. In my research I use detailed historical, census and administrative micro-data, and apply quantitative methods to identify the causal effects of policies. My research is part of a broader recent move toward providing data-driven insights into policy questions. My PhD dissertation consists of three separate chapters on labour economics that provide novel results about the mechanisms at play when incentives for production and location decisions change. The findings from my work have implications for policies on innovation, the integration of minorities and labour market reforms.My first chapter asks whether financial incentives can induce inventors to innovate more. For this analysis I exploit a large reduction in the patent fee in the United Kingdom in 1884 and created a detailed new dataset of 54,000 British inventors in an extensive data collection effort. The results indicate efficiency gains from decreasing the cost of inventing and in addition, from relaxing credit constraints. The second PhD paper investigates the effects of changes in ethnic neighbourhood composition in England and Wales. The findings imply that an exogenous increase in a neighbourhood's social housing minority share by 10 percentage points raises the minority share in private housing by 1.2 percentage points. It also leads to higher local population growth and a small decrease in house prices in the longer run. In the third PhD paper we assess the effects of comprehensive labour market reforms on employment and wages in Germany from 2003-2005. Contrary to previous findings, our analysis shows that the reforms marginally reduced unemployment at the cost of a pronounced decline in wages. Low-skilled workers suffered the largest wage losses. My proposed host institution for the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Department of Economics at the University College London (UCL), is one of the best economics departments in Europe and worldwide. Within the Department of Economics, I will be part of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), which is one of the most renowned research centres on the quantitative analysis of labour markets and migration, with a long-standing network and experience in informing the public debate on issues of critical policy concern. My mentor Professor Uta Schönberg is a leading expert in labour economics with a strong track record of publishing policy relevant research in the top academic journals in economics. The research agenda and expertise of my mentor overlaps closely with my proposed programme of work. With Professor Uta Schönberg as my mentor, and being a fully integrated member of CReAM and the Department of Economics at the UCL, I will be able to draw on highly specialised knowledge in applied labour economics. The ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship would provide me with an excellent opportunity to consolidate my academic portfolio in order to obtain a permanent lectureship position in the future.