CEP | People | Felix Koenig

Biography

Dr Felix Koenig is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also an associate of the CEP and an affiliate at IZA, CESifo, Rockwool and UCL's Stone Center. Felix's research focuses on labour markets and in recent projects he studies the causes and consequences of rising inequality.

Current areas of research include:

Labor market compensation: impact of technology on earnings, non monetary compensation and workplace amenities
Hiring and employment: hiring difficulty, automated hiring systems, recruiting, retirement, unemployment
Labor market disruption: job loss, relocation of firms, mobility, migration, resilience to disruption

Publications

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

Putting a value on safety

What the pandemic reveals about the risks that people are willing to take at work.... Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

21 October 2025

Journal article

Labor supply and entertainment innovations: evidence from the US TV rollout

We study the impact of entertainment technology on labor supply. Using Social Security work histories and a natural experiment arising from the regulated US rollout of television, we estimate that a station launch reduce... Read more...

George Fenton and Felix Koenig

01 October 2025

Journal article

Immigration and the top 1 percent

Using administrative data on the universe of U.K. taxpayers, we study the contribution of migrants to the rise in U.K. top incomes. We show that migrants are over-represented at the top of the income distribution, with m... Read more...

Arun Advani, Felix Koenig, Lorenzo Pessina and Andy Summers

17 July 2025

Blog

People value workplace safety more than traditionally believed

Some workplaces are inherently more dangerous than others, but during the pandemic almost all workplaces became risky. Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig investigated whether workers during COVID chose to forgo earnings to ... Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

15 July 2025

CEP discussion papers

Willingness to pay for workplace amenities

We develop a revealed preference approach to measure the value of workplace amenities by analyzing how variation in non-wage job attributes affects excess mass in the earnings distribution at budget discontinuities. The ... Read more...

Massimo Anelli and Felix Koenig

06 May 2025

Journal article

Reservation wages and the wage flexibility puzzle

Using micro data for the UK and Germany, we provide novel evidence on the cyclical properties of reservation wages and estimate that wages and reservation wages are characterised by moderate and very similar degrees of c... Read more...

Felix Koenig, Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo

29 October 2024

CEP discussion papers

Importing inequality: immigration and the top 1 percent

In this paper we study the contribution of migrants to the rise in UK top incomes. Using administrative data on the universe of UK taxpayers we show migrants are over-represented at the top of the income distribution, wi... Read more...

Arun Advani, Felix Koenig, Lorenzo Pessina and Andy Summers

24 September 2020

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

TV superstars: how a new technology disrupted the entertainment industry

The rollout of television to virtually every household in the United States in the mid-twentieth century created a potentially huge audience for people working in the entertainment industry. As Felix Koenig explains, thi... Read more...

Felix Koenig

02 March 2020

Blog

Technology can benefit a few superstar workers, at the expense of everyone else

The rollout of television provides a natural experiment, creating an opportunity to isolate the impact of a technical disruption on the labour market, writes Felix Koenig.... Read more...

Felix Koenig

29 February 2020

CEP discussion papers

Technical change and superstar effects: evidence from the roll-out of television

Technical change that improves economies of scale can generate fast income growth among top earners at the expense of everyone else. I test this classic ?superstar model? in the labor market for entertainers where the hi... Read more...

Felix Koenig

15 November 2019

Journal article

Can helping the sick hurt the able? Incentives, information and disruption in a welfare reform

The UK Jobcentre Plus reform sharpened bureaucratic incentives to help disability benefit recipients (relative to unemployment insurance recipients) into jobs. In the long run, the policy raised exits off disability bene... Read more...

Nitika Bagaria, Felix Koenig, Barbara Petrongolo and John Van Reenen

01 November 2019

CEP discussion papers

Reservation wages and the wage flexibility puzzle

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model ? even if wa... Read more...

Felix Koenig, Alan Manning and Barbara Petrongolo

15 February 2016

CEP discussion papers

Can helping the sick hurt the able? Incentives, information and disruption in a welfare reform

The UK Jobcentre Plus reform sharpened bureaucratic incentives to help disability benefit recipients (relative to unemployment insurance recipients) into jobs. In the long-run, the policy raised disability exits by 10% a... Read more...

Nitika Bagaria, Felix Koenig, Barbara Petrongolo and John Van Reenen

29 April 2015