Assist. Prof. Stefanie Haller, Ph.D.

Workers Form Firms

In a work in progress, Stefanie Haller (together with Ragnhild Balsvik and Doireann Fitzgerald) is investigating where newly established plants hire their workforce. The research examines whether these new hires are positively or negatively selected relative to the workforce as a whole. It also examines how initial worker characteristics and composition are correlated with plant survival and growth. Preliminary evidence suggests that newly entering plants hire workers that are positively selected relative to new hires at incumbent firms.

Stefanie Haller’s research interests lie in the fields of international trade and industrial organisation. Her work examines how globalisation affects markets, firms and workers. A recent paper (with Doireann Fitzgerald and Yaniv-Yedid Levi) uses customs microdata to show that in successful export episodes, exporters dramatically expand sales in their initial five years in a market. But somewhat surprisingly this growth in sales is not accompanied by systematic changes in prices. Successful exporters do not appear to expand sales by dropping prices to attract more and more buyers. Nor do they appear to use low initial prices to entice customers who will later be locked in. Rather, the joint behaviour of export quantities and prices suggests that non-price actions, such as marketing and advertising, are key to growth in successful export episodes.

Stefanie Haller is Assistant Professor at University College Dublin (UCD), where she has been employed since 2012. She previously worked for the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in Dublin. She studied economics at the University of Tübingen and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. She received her PhD from the European University Institute.