Labor Effects of Innovation Tax Breaks (with Sabien Dobbelaere)

Profit tax breaks from research and development (R&D) activities, known as Innovation Boxes, are increasingly used worldwide as fiscal tools to promote innovation. While prior research has primarily focused on their impact on firms' innovative output, evidence on labor market effects remains limited. This paper examines the labor effects of the Innovation Box policy in the Netherlands, using comprehensive firm-level administrative data linked to matched employer–employee records. We provide descriptive evidence using a staggered event-study design combined with a flexible matching procedure and strengthen these findings with an instrumental variables strategy that exploits the policy's timing and exogenous profit variation. Our results show that reduced taxation of innovation profits raises labor income for incumbent workers through higher contractual wages and bonuses, consistent with a rent-sharing mechanism for retention. The effects are concentrated among high earners, thereby widening within-firm wage inequality. Firms do not expand post-treatment hiring but adjust their long-run workforce composition toward younger, more skilled STEM employees.

Measuring Advertising Spillovers in the Automobile Industry (with Jose-Luis Moraga Gonzalez and Sandor Zsolt)

This paper examines the existence of advertising spillovers in the automobile industry. For this purpose, we formulate an empirical consideration set model of demand where advertising serves to increase buyer awareness. Each car model has an independent probability of being considered for purchase and this probability is influenced by a brand's own advertising, as well as the advertising of substitute models within the same brand, other brands within the same business group, and competing brands. We estimate the model using data from the Netherlands on regional car sales, prices, car advertising expenditures and car characteristics for the year 2008. We find evidence that own advertising increases the consideration probability of a car and that advertising spillovers are positive and sizable. These spillovers have important implications for firm strategy and market outcomes.

Work in progress

Building Blocks: Conduct and Labor in the Prefabricated Concrete Industry

Labor Force Composition and Competitivess (with Daniele Aglio and Sabien Dobbelaere)