Analysing the effects of economic shocks on individual workers and firms

As part of my PhD, I wish to research how and why different workers and firms react to economic shocks. Different groups of workers, such as those who are less educated, with less transferable skills, or of different gender or race, might have different outcomes following a given shock. Similarly, firms of different size, ownership structure, or worker composition might also have different reactions to the same shock. I plan to model these phenomena economically to derive falsifiable predictions which I will use administrative firm and individual level datasets to test structurally. Relatedly, I plan to find the causal effects of different economic shocks on workers and firms, building upon the results of my undergraduate dissertation entitled "Labour market effects of international trade: how does import competition affect UK workers' earnings and employment?". The increase in import competition from developing countries, the increasing effect of automation and job offshoring are just some of the shocks affecting developed economies today and their effect on different workers and firms is an important question, both for economic theory and policy.