Pascuel Plotkin

This paper studies how firm adoption of digital technologies reshapes labor demand and worker earnings. Linking administrative employer-employee records to restaurants and workers from a major delivery platform and using a matched event-study, I show that adopting restaurants substitute in-house labor hours one-for-one with outsourced platform-worker hours. Earnings losses for incumbent workers are modest because displaced workers reallocate to new formal-sector jobs. Exposed non-adopting restaurants are more likely to close, and their workers experience larger losses. I quantify earnings effects across restaurant and platform workers, showing how platform adoption redistributes earnings across workers and creates income outside traditional restaurant employment.

We exploit a novel identifier of outsourcing events present in Italian administrative data. This information permits us to estimate the effects of outsourcing across a wide set of occupations without restricting the analysis to workers who remain employed after being outsourced. We find that outsourcing leads to substantial earnings losses, primarily driven by the extensive margin---a margin not fully analyzed by previous research---as several outsourced workers become non-employed shortly after joining the contracting firms. Outsourced workers in non-routine manual jobs have the largest earnings losses, while those in jobs involving abstract, cognitive tasks experience some earnings gains following the outsourcing event. Our evidence is consistent with some Italian firms using outsourcing to bypass the country's strict employment protection legislation.

How does post-secondary education shape individuals’ exposure to economic shocks? This paper examines this question in the context of the 2014 oil price crash in Canada. Using unique data linking post-secondary education records to tax files, we find that a one-standard deviation decrease in school-major-specific labor demand reduces graduates’ earnings by 2.3 percent. Students most exposed to the shock were also more likely to file for unemployment insurance and engage in self-employment. Additionally, the labor demand shock reduced dropout rates, highlighting the role of students’ outside options in shaping school enrollment decisions.