Johannes Hirvonen — Economics PhD Student, Northwestern University

Bio

I am an economics PhD student at Northwestern University. Before Northwestern, I worked as a researcher at Etla Economic Research in Helsinki and completed my BSc and MSc in Economics at Aalto University (both with distinction). My research focuses on technology, innovation, and information, spanning industrial organization and labor economics.

You can find my CV here.

Contact

Address: Kellogg Global Hub, 2211 N Campus Dr, Evanston, IL 60208
Email: hirvonen@u.northwestern.edu

Research

You can find a list of my research also on my Google Scholar profile.

Working Papers

What Do Technology Grants Do?

with Aapo Stenhammar and Joonas Tuhkuri

Conditionally accepted at the Quarterly Journal of Economics

We present new evidence on the impact of EU technology grants on employment and skill mix in Finnish small and medium-sized manufacturing firms, 1994–2018. The subsidies funded new machinery, including robots. Comparing close grant winners and losers, we find that subsidized investments raised employment by 23 percent with no detectable change in the skill mix. We use machine learning on the text of application evaluations to match firms, and we analyze firms' stated plans and later outcomes. Our evidence suggests that these grants more often supported expansion—new products and markets—than directly automating work. By contrast, outside the program, IT investment is more strongly associated with skill upgrading than machinery investment. In this context, the technology grants raised employment while leaving the skill mix unchanged. The jobs created were primarily held by non-college workers.

Traps and Springboards: The Mobility Effects of Crisis Subsidies

with Otto Kässi and Olli Ropponen

Emergency firm subsidies aim to preserve employment but may also reshape worker reallocation. We provide micro-level causal evidence using Finland's largest COVID-19 subsidy program, exploiting quasi-random assignment of applications to case officers of differing stringency. The same subsidy increased upward mobility for workers in high-productivity firms but reduced it for workers in low-productivity firms. At low-productivity firms, subsidies increased survival and retained workers who would otherwise have moved to more productive employers. At high-productivity firms, subsidies did not alter the frequency of separations but improved their quality. Whether crisis subsidies act as traps or springboards depends on recipient firm productivity.