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We estimate the effects of robot adoption on firm-level and worker-level outcomes in the Netherlands using a large employer-employee panel dataset spanning 2009-2020. Our firm-level results confirm previous findings, with positive effects on value added and hours worked for robot-adopting firms and negative outcomes on competitors in the same industry. Our worker-level results show that directly-affected workers (e.g., bluecollar workers performing routine or replaceable tasks) face lower earnings and employment rates, while other workers indirectly gain from robot adoption. We also find that the negative effects from competitors' robot adoption load on directly-affected workers, while other workers benefit from this industry-level robot adoption. Overall, our results highlight the uneven effects of automation on the workforce.

This paper provides some of the first evidence of the relationship between eco-innovation and employment. Adopting a O*NET based task approach, in a study of the Dutch firms, we show that eco-innovation has no impact on overall employment. However, compared to non- eco-innovators there is an 18.2% increase in the number of green jobs (equivalent to 12 new green workers for the average firm). This means an average increase in the share of green workers of around 3.3%. Broadly speaking, the increase in the share of green jobs was driven by a reduction in non-green workers and a smaller but still significant increase in the number of green workers. We further show that subsidy-driven policies, rather than regulation-driven policies positively correlate with the number of green workers.

The empirical evidence on the economic impacts of diversity is mixed. Many studies in the literature present context dependent and data driven results which are challenging to reconcile with each other. This paper offers a systematic synthesis of the empirical findings on the economic impacts of diversity on innovation, productivity, and the labour market. It presents a structured framework which takes the spatial scale of the analysis in the papers as a reference to understand the inconsistency of some previous predictions and the varying magnitudes of the diversity impact. The empirical findings reconcile more meaningfully when diversity effects are documented discretely at the regional, firm and individual levels. The paper further sets out an agenda for future research and links the findings for policy relevance.

In light of the existing preliminary evidence of a link between Covid-19 and poor air quality, which is largely based upon correlations, we estimate the relationship between long term air pollution exposure and Covid-19 in 355 municipalities in the Netherlands. Using detailed secondary and administrative data we find compelling evidence of a positive relationship between air pollution, and particularly PM2.5 concentrations, and Covid-19 cases, hospital admissions and deaths. This relationship persists after controlling for a wide range of explanatory variables. Our results indicate that a 1 μ/m3 increase in PM2.5 concentrations is associated with 9.4 more Covid-19 cases, 3.0 more hospital admissions, and 2.3 more deaths. The relationship between Covid-19 and air pollution withstands a number of sensitivity and robustness exercises including instrumenting pollution to mitigate potential endogeneity and modelling spatial spillovers using spatial econometric techniques.

We estimate the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) of income for the Netherlands using complete population data for around 177,000 28-year olds. We find that IGEs are much lower when actual individual income data are used rather than proxies or aggregates for income. Though low, daughters' IGEs are higher than sons' indicating lower income mobility for women.

Persistence of high youth unemployment and dismal labour market outcomes are imminent concerns for most European economies. The relationship between demographic ageing and employment outcomes is even more worrying once the relationship is scrutinized at the regional level. We focus on modelling regional heterogeneity. We argue that an average impact across regions is often not very useful, and that—conditional on the region’s characteristics—impacts may differ significantly. We advocate the use of modelling varying level and slope effects, and specifically to cluster them by the use of latent class or finite mixture models (FMMs). Moreover, in order to fully exploit the output from the FMM, we adopt self-organizing maps to understand the composition of the resulting segmentation and as a way to depict the underlying regional similarities that would otherwise be missed if a standard approach was adopted. We apply our proposed method to a case-study of Germany where we show that the regional impact of young age cohorts on the labor market is indeed very heterogeneous across regions and our results are robust against potential endogeneity bias.

We assess how changes in youth cohort sizes effect employment rates in German labour market regions. Replicating the conventional approach, we estimate that a percentage increase in the youth share reduces regional employment rates by −0.2%. We challenge the assumption that cohort size effects are homogenous across space and find robust evidence that the negative effect of youth cohort size is more pronounced in the labour markets of metropolitan regions. These results suggest an upward pressure on urban regional employment rates as a result of the projected decrease in the size of the German youth share.

First published: 26 November 2015 We investigate econometrically whether cultural diversity at the workplace boosts innovation. Our longitudinal linked employer-employee data combines two innovation surveys, with Dutch administrative, tax and regional data. We analyse the determinants of a firm's product and process innovations with respect to the firm's internal resources, employee composition and regional agglomeration externalities. We reconfirm the findings of several other recent studies showing a positive partial correlation between innovation and cultural diversity in pooled cross-sectional data; in some cases even when accounting for reverse causation. However, no statistically significant traces of benefit for innovation from cultural diversity remain after introducing firm fixed effects.Resumen Este articulo investigo, desde el punto de vista econometrico, si la diversidad cultural en el lugar de trabajo impulsa la innovacion. Se combinan los datos entre empleador y empleado vinculados longitudinalmente de dos encuestas sobre innovacion con datos regionales, administrativos, y fiscales de Holanda. Se analizaron los determinantes de las innovaciones de una empresa en cuanto a productos y procesos en relacion a los recursos internos de la empresa, la composicion de los empleados y las externalidades de aglomeracion regionales. El estudio confirma una vez mas los hallazgos de varios estudios recientes que muestran una correlacion parcial positiva entre la innovacion y la diversidad cultural para datos transversales agrupados y, en algunos casos, incluso despues de descartar la causalidad inversa. Sin embargo, no quedan rastros estadisticamente significativos de los beneficios de la diversidad cultural en la innovacion despues de la introduccion de efectos fijos firmes.

Persistence of high youth unemployment and dismal labour market outcomes are imminent concerns for most European economies. The relationship between demographic ageing and employment outcomes is even more worrying once the relationship is scrutinized at the regional level. We focus on modelling regional heterogeneity. We argue that an average impact across regions is often not very useful, and that conditional on the region's characteristics impacts may differ significantly. We advocate the use of modelling varying level and slope effects, and specifically to cluster them by the use of latent class or finite mixture models (FMMs). Moreover, in order to fully exploit the output from the FMM, we adopt self-organizing maps to understand the composition of the resulting segmentation and as a way to depict the underlying regional similarities that would otherwise be missed if a standard approach was adopted. We apply our proposed method to a case-study of Germany where we show that the regional impact of young age cohorts on the labor market is indeed very heterogeneous across regions and our results are robust against potential endogeneity bias.

To investigate econometrically whether cultural diversity of a firm's employees boosts innovation, we create a unique linked employer-employee dataset that combines data from two innovation surveys in The Netherlands with administrative and tax data. We calculate three distinct measures of diversity. We find that firms that employ fewer foreign workers are generally more innovative, but that diversity among a firm's foreign workers is positively associated with innovation activity. The positive impact of diversity on product or process innovations is greater among firms in knowledge-intensive sectors and in internationally-oriented sectors. The impact is robust to accounting for endogeneity of foreign employment.

Due to the growth in international migration in recent decades, the workforce of firms in host countries has become considerably more diverse, both demographically and culturally. It is an important question for firms and for governments to ask whether there are some productivity-enhancing externalities gained from this growing diversity within firms. In recent years migration research has demonstrated positive economic impacts of cultural diversity on productivity and innovation at the regional level. However, there is a dearth of research on the links between innovation and migrant diversity at the firm level. In this paper we construct and analyse a unique linked employer-employee micro-dataset of 4582 firms, based on survey and administrative data obtained from Statistics Netherlands. Excluding firms in the hospitality industry and other industries that employ low-skilled migrants, we use the local number of restaurants with foreign cuisines and the historical presence of migrant communities as valid instruments of endogenous migrant settlement. We find that firms in which foreigners account for a relatively large share of employment are somewhat less innovative. However, there is strong evidence that firms that employ a more diverse foreign workforce are more innovative, particularly in terms of product innovations.

We compare a set of econometric studies that measure the effect of net internal migration in neoclassical models of long-run real income convergence and derive 67 comparable effect sizes. The precision-weighted estimate of beta convergence is about 2.7%. An increase in the net migration rate of a region by one percentage point in increases the per capita income growth rate in that region on average by about 0.1 percentage points, thus suggesting an impact of net migration that is more consistent with endogenous self-reinforcing growth than with neoclassical convergence. Introducing a net migration variable in a growth regression increases the estimate of beta convergence slightly. Studies that use panel models or IV estimation methods yield smaller coefficients of net migration in growth regressions, while the opposite holds for regressions controlling for high-skilled migration.

We compare a set of econometric studies that measure the effect of net internal migration in neoclassical models of long-run real income convergence and derive 67 comparable effect sizes. The precision-weighted estimate of beta convergence is about 2.7%. An increase in the net migration rate of a region by one percentage point in increases the per capita income growth rate in that region on average by about 0.1 percentage points, thus suggesting an impact of net migration that is more consistent with endogenous self-reinforcing growth than with neoclassical convergence. Introducing a net migration variable in a growth regression increases the estimate of beta convergence slightly. Studies that use panel models or IV estimation methods yield smaller coefficients of net migration in growth regressions, while the opposite holds for regressions controlling for high-skilled migration.