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Papers written by Author(s): 'James Davis'

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  • Working Paper

    Twisting the Demand Curve: Digitalization and the Older Workforce

    November 2020

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-20-37

    This paper uses U.S. Census Bureau panel data that link firm software investment to worker earnings. We regress the log of earnings of workers by age group on the software investment by their employing firm. To unpack the potential causal factors for differential software effects by age group we extend the AKM framework by including job-spell fixed effects that allow for a correlation between the worker-firm match and age and by including time-varying firm effects that allow for a correlation between wage-enhancing productivity shocks and software investments. Within job-spell, software capital raises earnings at a rate that declines post age 50 to about zero after age 65. By contrast, the effects of non-IT equipment investment on earnings increase for workers post age 50. The difference between the software and non-IT equipment effects suggests that our results are attributable to the technology rather than to age-related bargaining power. Our data further show that software capital increases the earnings of high-wage workers relative to low-wage workers and the earnings in high-wage firms relative to low-wage firms, and may thus widen earnings inequality within and across firms.
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  • Working Paper

    It's Where You Work: Increases In Earnings Dispersion Across Establishments And Individuals In The U.S.

    September 2014

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-14-33

    This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of ln earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within-establishments and finds that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. It also shows that the divergence of establishment earnings occurred within and across industries and was associated with increased variance of revenues per worker. Our results direct attention to the fundamental role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.
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  • Working Paper

    Economic Factors Underlying the Unbundling of Advertising Agency Services

    August 2009

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-09-15

    This paper addresses a longstanding puzzle involving the unbundling of services that has occurred over more than two decades in the U.S. advertising agency industry: How can the shift from the bundling to the unbundling of services be explained and what accounts for the slow pace of change? Using a cost-based theoretical framework of bundling due to Evans and Salinger (2005, 2008), we develop a simple model of an advertising agency's decision to unbundle its services as a tradeoff between the fixed cost to the advertiser of establishing and maintaining a relationship with an advertising agency and pecuniary economies of scale available in providing media services. The results from an econometric analysis of cross-sectional and pooled data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for quinquenial censuses conducted between 1982 and 2002 support the key predictions of the model. We find that advertising agency establishments are more likely to unbundle if they are large and diversified in their service offerings and are less likely to do so with increasing age and greater geographical scope. We also find a strong trend toward unbundling over time, a result that is partially explained by increases in media prices over time.
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  • Working Paper

    Spatial Organization of Firms: The Decision to Split Production and Administration

    February 2004

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-04-03

    A firm's production activities are often supported by non-production activities. Among these activities are administrative units including headquarters, which process information both within and between firms. Often firms physically separate such administrative units from their production activities and create stand alone Central Administrative Offices (CAO). However, having its activities in multiple locations potentially imposes significant internal firm face-to-face communication costs. What types of firms are more likely to separate out such functions? If firms do separate administration and production, where do they place CAOs and why? How often do firms open and close, or relocate CAOs? This paper documents such firms' decisions on their spatial organization by using micro-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
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  • Working Paper

    The Agglomeration of Headquarters

    February 2004

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-04-02

    This paper uses a micro data set on auxiliary establishments from 1977 to 1997 in order to investigate the determinants of headquarter agglomerations and the underlying economic base of many larger metro areas. The significance of headquarters in large urban settings is their ability to facilitate the spatial separation of their white collar activities from remote production plants. The results show that separation benefits headquarters in two main ways: the availability of di?erentiated local service input suppliers and the scale of other headquarter activity nearby. A wide diversity of local service options allows the headquarters to better match their various needs with specific experts producing service inputs from whom they learn, which improves their productivity. Headquarters also benefit from other headquarter neighbors, although such marginal scale benefits seem to diminish as local scale rises.
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