What Drives My Research
Technological change continually reshapes the capabilities firms need to remain competitive, forcing incumbent firms to transform rather than simply optimize existing ways of working. My research is organized around a fundamental strategic question: How do incumbent firms build the organizational capabilities required to adapt to technological change?
I study the organizational work that sits between technological investment and organizational transformation. Specifically, I examine how firms build and deploy new workforce capabilities, how organizational structures and managers shape implementation, and how these processes determine whether strategic investments become sustained sources of competitive advantage. While my current research focuses on organizational adaptation to AI, automation, and the transition to electric vehicles, I am broadly interested in understanding the organizational capabilities that enable firms to repeatedly adapt across successive waves of technological change.
A defining feature of my research is directly observing and measuring organizational processes that are often inferred rather than measured. I develop long-term partnerships with firms undergoing technological transformation and combine rich administrative data and large-scale surveys with embedded qualitative fieldwork inside these organizations. I aim to produce research that advances strategy theory while providing practical insights for organizations navigating technological change.
Job Market Paper
Abstract
Firms invest heavily in reskilling their workforces to adopt new technologies, yet little is known about whether these investments translate into the redeployment of workers into new roles. Studying a large German automotive manufacturer that rolled out a standardized, centrally designed reskilling program across its plants, I combine administrative personnel and training records with roughly 100 field interviews and archival evidence, and estimate worker-level effects using a staggered difference-in-differences design. Despite a common curriculum, selection process, and corporate mandate, implementation varies sharply across units: a substantial share of certified workers are never redeployed into the roles for which they were trained, and wage gains reflect a credential-triggered pay-band adjustment rather than the application of newly acquired skills. The firm thus succeeds at value creation by building valuable, certified human capital, but systematically falls short on value capture, which materializes only when those skills are deployed. I show that middle managers—who control selection, the quality of practical training, and placement—are the pivotal mechanism, and develop a process model of how managerial discretion determines whether reskilling becomes deployed organizational capability.
Selected Working Papers
Abstract
Employer-provided training is central to firms’ responses to technological change, but little is known about how firms design and organize training programs. We provide new survey evidence from the Employer Reskilling and Upskilling Survey (ERUS), which measures program design, skill needs, and supporting HR infrastructure in a large sample of medium and large U.S. firms. For each firm’s most important upskilling or reskilling program, the survey records detailed features of delivery, selection, funding, incentives, assessment, placement, and skill-management systems. Skill gaps and firm-sponsored training are widespread. We document three stylized facts. First, training investments sort into two coherent organizational typologies: a leaner, standalone configuration and a more formalized, system-integrated architecture (multi-location delivery, on-the-job learning, external design, mandatory participation, formal assessment, targeting managerial roles). Second, these configurations differ in structure, not intensity: training hours, duration, cost, and targeted skills are similar across types. Third, the more articulated configuration co-occurs with specific firm characteristics (MNE status, firm size) and the presence of structured HR policies. These findings provide the first large-scale evidence on the organization of firm-sponsored training, shifting attention from whether firms train to how firms structure training investments.
Abstract
Organizations increasingly provide digital learning platforms to support workforce development, yet little is known about whether and how employees actually engage with them. We study the rollout of a digital learning platform at a global automotive manufacturer, linking platform learning records to administrative HR data for more than 129,000 employees across 32 countries. We document a substantial engagement gap: although most employees activate their license, actual learning is minimal — the median employee completes zero courses. Engagement varies sharply across the organization, with higher participation among women, middle managers, and employees in knowledge-intensive roles, and country-level activation rates ranging from below 5% to above 50%. Preliminary results point to direct managers as a key driver of engagement: a one-standard-deviation increase in a direct supervisor’s platform activation is associated with a 19-percentage-point increase in subordinate activation, while more senior managers show no comparable association. Exploiting the staggered country-level rollout of licenses, we find no significant short-run effects of platform engagement on promotion outcomes. Building on these findings, we are collaborating with the firm on a randomized field experiment testing communication strategies to increase employee engagement in digital learning.