About me

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at the University of St.Gallen. My primary advisor is Roland Hodler. My research covers topics in Economic Geography, International Trade, and Macroeconomics with a focus on climate change and developing countries.

From September 23 through June 24, I visited Adam Storeygard at Tufts University.

I will be on the academic job market in 25/26.

You can find my CV here.
Feel free to get in touch: michael.tueting@unisg.ch

Job market paper

• Climate Change, Income Inequality, and Migration in a Spatial Economy

  Abstract: Negative local labor market shocks create strong incentives to migrate, yet low-income households often remain in place. This paper studies how income shapes migration responses to climate change and the resulting welfare effects. Using Brazilian Census data, I first show that higher-income individuals are systematically more mobile than poorer individuals from the same origin. To interpret this pattern and quantify climate impacts, I develop a dynamic spatial equilibrium model with income-dependent migration costs, embedded in a two-sector trade framework where rising temperatures depress agricultural productivity. The model implies sharply regressive climate losses: in already-hot regions, low-income households suffer permanent consumption declines of about 1–1.5% per period, with worst-case losses near 5%, while richer households are largely insulated. Two mechanisms drive these disparities: climate shocks reduce agricultural wages in hot areas, and monetary migration costs disproportionately burden low-income individuals, limiting their mobility even as wage gaps widen. A counterfactual policy that equalizes migration costs across incomes—modeled as a targeted subsidy—raises low-income households’ lifetime welfare by about 14%, offsets 8% of their baseline climate losses (3% nationally), and increases aggregate output by reallocating labor to more productive regions. The policy is fiscally efficient: present-value gains equal 32% of baseline GDP against costs of 8%. Adaptation to climate change thus depends not only on where productivity shocks occur but also on who can afford to move; therefore, the incidence of adverse shocks falls disproportionately on those who cannot afford to move.

Work in progress

• Skill Supply, Firm Size, and Economic Development, with Charles Gottlieb and Markus Poschke.
Abstract.

The organization of production varies widely across countries, with firms being substantially smaller in low-income countries. At the same time, educational attainment is lower in low-income countries. How are these two patterns related? In this paper, we examine the relationship between skill endowment and firm size across different stages of economic development. Using harmonized labor force data from 54 countries, we measure the skill intensity of employment by firm size and document four key facts. First, we show that the share of employment in large firms is about twice as high in high-income countries as in low-income countries. Second, across countries, large firms employ more skilled workers than small firms. Third, small firms in high-income countries are nearly as skill-intensive as large firms, but small firms in low-income countries employ far fewer skilled workers than their larger counterparts. Fourth, the skill gap between small and large firms is narrow when the skill premium is low, but it widens substantially when the premium is high. These findings suggest that small firms can easily substitute high-skill for low-skill workers when skilled workers are scarce and expensive, whereas large firms are less flexible. As a result, lower availability of high-skilled workers restricts the prevalence of large firms in low-income economies. We then use a span-of-control model with worker skill heterogeneity and two technologies (large- and small-scale) to analyze the impact of skill endowments on firm size distribution and economic development. Calibrated to U.S. data and varying only skill endowments to match those of low-, middle-, and high-income countries, the model replicates observed employment patterns by firm size and the skill intensity of firms across different stages of development. We interpret this as evidence that differences in skill endowments are a central driver of firm size distribution. Our findings imply that skill accumulation promotes development directly, by increasing productivity, and indirectly, by enabling the expansion of larger, more productive firms.

Latest version.

Coverage: An earlier version was a background paper for the World Bank's 2024 World Development Report.

• Infrastructure, language, and the making of a common market, with Roland Hodler and Paul Schaudt.
Abstract.

This paper studies market integration in Switzerland -- a rare success story among countries with adverse geography and high ethnolinguistic diversity. We provide an augmented market access measure that accounts for physical and linguistic interregional trade barriers. Using data on rail and road infrastructure as well as administrative data on population and languages, we employ a non-linear estimation strategy to structurally estimate the evolution of transportation costs and language barriers from 1888 to 2000. We document that transportation costs initially decreased due to the extension of the rail network and later because traveling on roads became cheaper. While transportation costs decreased, the elasticity of trade with respect to transportation costs did not change over time. In contrast, the elasticity of trade with respect to language barriers shows a downward trend. We also document that language barriers decrease when individuals learn a new language because they live in an area where another language is spoken, but we find no evidence that compulsory foreign language education reduces language barriers to trade.

• The Economic Geography of Wage Distributions.

Teaching Assistance

Bachelor
• Economics of Climate Change (2023)
• Public Sector Economics (2022-2023; 2025)
• Development Economics (2020-2022; 2024-2025)
• Data Handling: Import, Cleaning, and Visualisation (2021-2023)
• Introduction to Macroeconomics (2017-2019)
• Operations Management (2017)
Master
• Political Economics (2021-2022)
• Failed States and Nation Building (2024-2025)

I publish under the name Tueting, the standard transliteration of my German name Tüting (IPA: [ˈtyːtɪŋ]).