Winners and Losers: Competition, Creative Destruction, and Labor Income Risk

Status: New Draft Coming Soon!

Joint with Lawrence D.W. Schmidt, Dimitris Papanikolaou, Leonid Kogan

Using U.S. administrative data, we find that creative destruction in the product market passes through to worker earnings. This passthrough is both asymmetric and concentrated: profit drops from rival innovations lead to proportionally greater earning declines than profit gains from their own firm’s innovations due to job destruction, while top workers are significantly more exposed than the average worker. We interpret the implications for worker welfare using a structural model featuring creative destruction in the product market. Our estimates imply significant welfare losses and demand for insurance for creative destruction.

baggr (ctb)

R package making it easy to run Bayesian meta-analysis models with Stan on the back-end.

quantspace (aut)

Implements the quantile spacings approach of Schmidt and Zhu, modeling the log distance between quantiles via quantile regression rather than a linear quantile model as a simple way to prevent quantile crossing.

wrds (aut)

R package for accessing the wrds back end PostgreSQL database. Makes it easy to authenticate, connect, access, search, and load WRDS data. Connects with the dbplyr package, allowing you to load an entire schema into your R session as dbplyr tables.

Massachussetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, MA

Degree: PhD

Subject: Finance

(Current)

University of Texas at Austin

Austin, TX

Degree: MA

Subject: Economics

Graduated 2019

Williams College

Williamstown, MA

Degree: BA

Subject: Music, Economics

Graduated 2015