The Changing Nature of Work, Job Loss and Institutions: Three Essays in Labor Economics

This PhD thesis investigates key societal challenges—including technological change, job loss, and institutional reforms—and their consequences for workers and firms. Across all three papers, the thesis leverages rich administrative data and credible empirical strategies—primarily difference-in-differences and event-study designs—to contribute to contemporary debates on the changing nature of work, the scarring effects of job loss, and the influence of workers' voice institutions. A recurring theme throughout the dissertation is that worker and firm outcomes are highly context-specific, requiring careful disentanglement. This highlights the importance of research designs that explicitly account for heterogeneity across firms, workers, and institutional settings. The first paper (Automation, Firm Size, and Skill Groups) examines the effects of automation investments on employment dynamics and workforce composition in Portugal. Exploiting the lumpy nature of automation imports, the study shows that the employment impact of automation is heterogeneous across firm size: while small firms experience job creation, larger firms see job losses. Moreover, contrary to the common view of automation as inherently skill-biased, the findings suggest that automation disproportionately benefits low-educated, blue-collar workers in routine-intensive occupations over highly skilled professionals, including those in STEM fields. The second paper (A Seat at the Table: The Effects of Workers’ Representation on Firm Performance and Jobs) analyzes the impact of a 2015 policy reform in France, which mandated board-level employee representation in firms with more than 1,000 employees. Using linked employer–employee data and combining difference-in-differences with difference-in-discontinuity approaches, the study finds that employee representation enhances job quality without compromising firm performance. The analysis further reveals sectoral heterogeneity, with differential effects across manufacturing and services, underscoring how institutional reforms interact with sector-specific contexts. The third paper (The Determinants of the Scarring Effects of Job Loss) investigates the distributional consequences of job displacement due to firm closures in Portugal, with a focus on underlying mechanisms. Building on the estimator of Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) and extending it with cohort-specific matched control groups, the paper documents large and persistent earnings losses. These losses are concentrated among high-wage workers and are driven primarily by declines in hourly wages rather than reemployment probabilities. The results confirm that earnings losses are strongly cyclical—typically worsening during economic downturns. Yet, during the COVID-19 crisis, countervailing dynamics emerged, with mitigating effects for low-wage workers, underscoring the importance of heterogeneity and wage dynamics in shaping post-displacement trajectories. Taken together, the three papers provide a nuanced understanding of labor market transformations in the contemporary economy. By combining large-scale administrative data from France and Portugal with state-of-the-art microeconometric methods, the dissertation offers credible, policy-relevant insights. The findings demonstrate that automation is not inherently skill-biased, that institutional reforms can improve job quality without productivity trade-offs, and that the scarring effects of job loss are deeply heterogeneous, shaped by both cyclical conditions and worker characteristics.