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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 8th June 2024, 01:51:51pm EDT
Session Chair: Emmanuel Yimfor, Columbia University Discussant: Daniel Greenwald, NYU Stern
Location:Room 601
Presentations
Innovation Booms, Easy Financing, and Human Capital Accumulation
Johan Hombert1, Adrien Matray2
1HEC Paris; 2Stanford University
Innovation booms are often fueled by easy financing that allows new technology firms to pay high wages that attracts skilled labor. Using the late 1990s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) boom as a laboratory, we show that skilled labor joining this new sector experienced sizeable long-term earnings losses. We show these earnings patterns are explained by faster skill obsolescence rather than either worker selection or the overall bust in the ICT sector. During the boom, financing flowed more to firms whose workers would experience the largest productivity declines, amplifying the negative effect of labor reallocation on aggregate human capital accumulation.