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This paper tests for employer learning about worker ability and quantifies the role of learning in improving the allocation of talent in the labor market for computer scientists. We match the job history of over 40,000 Ph.D. computer scientists (CS) with publications and patent applications that signal their research ability. Workers who publish at CS conferences are twice as likely to move to a top tech firm in the next year as similar coworkers without a publication. Higher-quality papers are often filed as patent applications, but the fact of filing remains private information at the incumbent employer for 18 months. Authors of such papers experience a delayed increase in inter-firm and upward mobility. Without employer learning from public research records, the innovation output of early career computer scientists would drop by 16%. Disclosing patent applications one year faster would increase innovation by 1%, driven by faster positive assortative matching. 

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

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This paper develops new procedures to measure environmental performance in cross-country firm-level data, explore the heterogeneity in environmental performance and its relationship with economic performance based on data from Croatia, France, Indonesia, and Lithuania. It documents extensive firm heterogeneity in carbon productivity (defined as value added per tonne of CO2 emitted) within narrowly defined industries, which significantly exceeds the extent of heterogeneity in labour productivity. On average, the 90th percentile firm is 22 times more carbon productive than the 10th percentile firm in the same industry (compared with seven times for labour productivity). This heterogeneity has important implications for aggregate emissions: raising the carbon productivity of the least productive firms to the carbon productivity of the median firm in their industry would reduce carbon emissions by 72% for the same level of output in total across the four countries. Furthermore, a growing carbon productivity dispersion is associated with a lower carbon productivity growth. Industries that are more dispersed in carbon productivity are also more dispersed in labour productivity and firms that are more carbon productive are also more labour productive, even when controlling for other factors. These correlations also hold in changes over time and suggest that structural characteristics of both firms and industries may jointly explain both economic and environmental outcomes. Firm-level regressions show that a plausibly exogenous increase in energy prices – as would be induced by a carbon tax – cause a significant fall in CO2 and an improvement in carbon productivity, without detrimental economic effects. This evidence suggests that there is a significant untapped potential of improved environmental performance and reduction in industrial emissions, and that these improvements could be achieved without affecting economic performance.

Contact person: Albert Roger

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Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

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Contact person: Peter Slowinski

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Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

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Contact person: Benedikt Probst

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Contact person: Benedict Probst

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Contact person: Michael Rose

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Contact person: Cheng Li

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