Philipp Ehrl

• The present thesis is based on four articles in the areas of labor economics, regional science and international trade. I make use of different micro-level data sets to evaluate reasons for performance disparities between firms and between workers and evaluate the interrelation of these disparities with characteristics of local labor markets. Chapter 1 of this thesis provides a discrimination between the effects of several agglomeration externalities on firms’ total factor productivity. The identification of TFP is not trivial, however. I thereby correct for biases due to unobserved output prices and the endogeneity of agglomeration economies. Traditional reasons, such as specialization, diversity and size of the county, as well as the more detailed Marshallian agglomeration economies, namely knowledge spillovers and labor market pooling, are jointly tested. It turns out that labor market pooling is the quantitatively most important agglomeration mechanism. It is captured by the correlation of the occupational composition between oneThe present thesis is based on four articles in the areas of labor economics, regional science and international trade. I make use of different micro-level data sets to evaluate reasons for performance disparities between firms and between workers and evaluate the interrelation of these disparities with characteristics of local labor markets. Chapter 1 of this thesis provides a discrimination between the effects of several agglomeration externalities on firms’ total factor productivity. The identification of TFP is not trivial, however. I thereby correct for biases due to unobserved output prices and the endogeneity of agglomeration economies. Traditional reasons, such as specialization, diversity and size of the county, as well as the more detailed Marshallian agglomeration economies, namely knowledge spillovers and labor market pooling, are jointly tested. It turns out that labor market pooling is the quantitatively most important agglomeration mechanism. It is captured by the correlation of the occupational composition between one county-industry and the rest of the county. The intuition behind it is that a plant readily finds suitable staff if sectors, which employ similar workers, have a large extent in the same region. Labor market pooling is still the dominant agglomeration force if the spatial boundaries of regions are changed. In general, the data demonstrate that the strength of agglomeration economies varies largely between sectors. Only for a subset of industries, some positive evidence is detected for knowledge spillovers. Chapter 2 analyzes labor market pooling in greater detail, but with a slightly different modeling than in chapter 1. Here, the central aspect of labor market pooling is based on the quality of workers and firms. The main questions are if there is a systematic matching in the labor market and if this matching pattern creates advantages for both parties. I devote attention to the identification of accurate quality measures: plants' total factor productivity and workers' fixed effect. Two different methods then yield evidence in favor of positive assortative matching. The correlation between both quality measures is positive. Wage gains amount up to 4% when both quality levels are equal. In a fairly general matching model, this shape of the wage curve arises due to complementarities of qualities in the production function. When generally higher productivities and wages in dense regions (caused by agglomeration economies and sorting) are not controlled for, the strength of matching and wage gains are overestimated. I also find that regional differences in matching quality cannot be attributed to the local density and unemployment rate. Chapter 3 applies several regression-based decomposition methods to analyze the impact of region-, worker-, firm- and sector-specific determinants on the wage level and the continuous increase in wage inequality between 1995 and 2007 in Germany. In contrast to prior studies, more than 50% of the wage dispersion and almost the entire increase in wage inequality are explained in this approach. Altogether, the entire growth of wage dispersion occurs within regions and changes in the composition of wage determinants are minor compared to changes in their returns. I find that occupational attributes are the most important wage determinant. Changes in the firm size premium in combination with assortative matching also depress wages in the bottom of the distribution while they increase wages at the top. Workers with an unemployment record or an occupation in the service, construction and logistics sectors particularly experience falling wages. Chapter 4 studies the effect of an expansion of imported intermediate inputs on establishments’ average task intensities and employment size in a middle-income country. I use confidential matched employer-employee data and information on trade transactions for the universe of Brazilian firms. Propensity Score Matching indicates that import expansion leads to an overall employment growth, higher intensities in routine and non-routine manual tasks and an increased share of intermediates exports. Thus my findings point out that intermediates imports represent onshored instead of offshored tasks. This result remains unchanged regardless of whether imports from high- or low-wage countries are considered.…