Research areas: Innovation, Public Economics, Labor Economics

My name is Amirhossein Tavakoli, and I am a PhD Candidate at the UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics My research interests are in Innovation, Public Economics, and Labor Economics. In my job market paper, I study skilled-biased technological change at innovative firms exploiting an R&D tax credit in Canada

R&D Expenditures, Productivity, and Wage Inequality: Evidence from an R&D Tax Credit

This paper examines the impact of R&D tax credits on between-firm and withinfirm wage inequality. Leveraging a regression kink design and matched employeremployee tax records, I estimate a large and statistically significant increase in R&D expenditures. The results show that R&D-intensive firms respond to tax credits with substantial increases in R&D expenditures, leading to significant gains in profitability, productivity, and wages while non-R&D-intensive firms show minimal changes. These gains disproportionately benefit high-skill, older, and long-tenured workers, exacerbating wage inequality between and within firms. High-skill workers experience the largest earnings gains, with a 10 percent increase in generosity of the tax credits leading to a 1.6 percent rise in their annual earnings. In contrast, low-skill workers see no significant changes. These findings provide evidence of rent-sharing mechanisms and highlight the role of R&D tax credits in contributing to wage inequality.

Job Transitions and Employee Earnings After Acquisitions: Linking Corporate and Worker Outcomes

Abstract: This paper connects changes in employer characteristics through job transitions to employee earnings following mergers and acquisitions. Using firm balance sheet data linked to individual earnings data in Canada and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that earnings of workers at target firms decrease after M&As, largely driven by those who move to other firms. Workers leaving targets move to larger and more profitable firms, but experience wage declines potentially due to a loss of firm-specific human capital or backloaded contracts. It appears that losses of match-specific premiums from job transitions primarily explain the post-M&A earnings decline in our setting.

Corporate Acquisitions and Investment: Evidence from Europe

Abstract: This paper assesses how corporate M&As affect firms’ investment in long-term capital. Using financial data (2009 – 2018) for 10 European countries, we compare firms that went through M&As with similar non-M&A firms before and after the events. We find that acquirers significantly decreased their fixed assets after M&As and that the reduction was not driven by reallocation between merging parties or across different types of assets. Heterogeneity analyses based on industries reveal that the decline in investment was unlikely driven by the market power channel. Instead, acquirers appear to reduce long-term assets and increase debts to finance their acquisitions.

What do one hundred million transactions tell us about demand elasticity of gasoline?

Abstract: The price elasticity of gasoline demand is a key parameter in evaluating various policies. However, most of the literature uses aggregate data to identify this elasticity. Temporal and spatial aggregation make such elasticity estimates biased. We employ a unique dataset of all gasoline transactions in Iran during a 4-month period around an unexpected exogenous price change to identify that price elasticity. We also identify a significant withholding behaviour by consumers in response to anticipated price changes. The consumers reduce or postpone their purchases when they expect a price decrease. Controlling for date fixed effects would eliminate homogeneous withholding responses. However, heterogeneous responses to this anticipated price change would lead to overestimating price elasticity. After controlling for date, individual, and location fixed effects as well as the withholding behaviour, we estimate a robust significant price elasticity of − 0.085. Aggregation of the same data by week, month, and city yields an estimate of − 0.3, indicating a significant bias in earlier studies.

• Center for Innovative Data in Economics, Research Grant, 2021
• UBC Affiliated Fellowships – Doctoral competition, 2020
• UBC President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD, 2020-2024

I have served as a teaching assistant across a wide range of economics courses, including PhD-level Microeconomics (Econ 601 and 602), Economics of Taxation (Econ 450), and Economics and Law (Econ 367). Additionally, I have supported courses such as Introduction to International Finance (Econ 356), Topics in Public Finance (Econ 350), and both introductory and advanced empirical research methods (Econ 328, 325). My experience also extends to intermediary microeconomics (Econ 301) and introductory macroeconomics (Econ 102), providing me with a broad foundation in both theoretical and applied economics.