Three essays in applied macro.

Summary During my dissertation, I conducted applied macroeconomic research on a variety of topics, ranging from the effects of job polarization on worker reallocation to the effects of monetary policy on firm capital structure and financial decisions. This thesis collects three papers on these arguments. The main paper of the thesis is my job market paper. This work gave me the opportunity to explore in detail the effects of technological change on the occupational structure of labor markets, but also its effects on the reallocation of workers between jobs and the process of sorting skills into jobs. In other words, the paper answers these questions: how do workers use the occupational ladder when technological innovation changes its structure? What are their job opportunities, given their skills, when technology changes? And what skills are employers looking for? This argument has always intrigued me, and its relevance is currently attracting the attention of governments and policymakers in many developed economies. My research departs from these facts to analyze what the effects of technological change are on workers and firms. In particular, it shows - as has already been documented in the literature on job polarization - that technological innovation reshapes the occupational structure of the economy by destroying certain types of jobs. However, I show that technological innovation changes the demand for skills in each occupation in ways that have heterogeneous effects on workers in terms of labor mobility, job opportunities, and matching quality. In particular, this paper is the first to show that technology - by causing labor market polarization - triggers large movements from the top to the bottom of the job ladder, with many workers ending up in lower-paying, lower-skilled occupations. The effects of technological change on labor market outcomes and dynamics are also examined in the second chapter of this thesis. In particular, this work, in collaboration with Joanne Tan, shows how technological change can explain the increase in occupational shortage and how different segments of the labor market respond to it In the final chapter of the thesis, I focus on the relationship between monetary policy and the stock buyback decision. This topic is unrelated to the previous one, but I have always been interested in how macro-variables can influence managers' decisions at the micro level. In this work, jointly with Assia Elgouacem, we use firm-level data and show that US firms buy back more of their own shares during periods of accommodative monetary policy, i.e. when the cost of debt is low. In fact, we show that if a firm's yield curve adjusts in the direction expected by monetary policy, i.e., the cost of debt decreases, the firm will issue more bonds to raise funds at lower cost. However, they will use most of this new cash to fund a buyback program rather than invest in new capital and jobs. This crowding out effect of buybacks on new investment and employment is questionable because it dampens the transmission of monetary policy.