Joint with Marc Fleurbaey

▼ Abstract

We study responsible firms that internalize incumbent-worker surplus in frictional labor markets. In a firm-level benchmark, responsibility creates an endogenous wedge in the effective marginal cost of labor—akin to a hiring subsidy in the firm's first-order conditions—so it changes wage and vacancy incentives rather than only redistributing rents. The wedge is largest when outside options are weak and separations are rare, implying larger responsible wage premia in low-mobility environments and pointing to a countercyclical role for responsible wage setting. In a wage-posting model with on-the-job search, responsible firms occupy the upper tail of the wage distribution and can generate a segmented high-wage sector.In a DMP model with bargaining and endogenous tightness, responsible governance raises the value of unemployment and spills over to wages at profit-maximizing firms.

Joint with Paolo Zacchia

▼ Abstract

We study staged entry with costly gatekeeping in a differentiated-products economy: entrepreneurs observe noisy signals before paying a resource-intensive activation cost. Precision improves selection but requires more resources, reducing entry and variety: welfare need not rise with precision. Under CES preferences, the activation cutoff is efficient as profit displacement offsets the consumer-surplus gain from variety. Welfare losses arise from verification costs shrinking the feasible set of varieties, not from misaligned incentives. Because the market responds efficiently to any given regime, these losses cannot be corrected via Pigouvian taxes.

> Project selected for the VisitINPS 2019 program

▼ Abstract

Do workers consider a firm’s “springboard” value in terms of future job opportunities when choosing an employer? Using a search model of the labor market, I introduce the idea that firms differ in enhancing their employees’ chances of receiving external job offers. The model informs a firm-level proxy for outside job offers received by workers. This measure empirically aligns with key model predictions: 1) it negatively correlates with both firm-specific tenure and young workers’ entry salaries, revealing a compensating differential; and 2) it suggests that workers enjoy a salary premium upon leaving such firms, indicative of faster career progression. The model is estimated on administrative data from Italy and successfully captures key aspects of labor market dynamics. My channel explains 10% of the overall job-to-job transitions and shows how firm-induced variation in job search can be a significant driver of inequality, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution.

Joint with Paolo Zacchia

▼ Abstract

We document how a reduction in labor costs led to heterogeneous effects on manufacturing firms’ total factor productivity (TFP). Leveraging an Italian labor legislation reform and unique institutional features of the local collective bargaining system, we show that such effects vary along the TFP distribution. Relative to the counterfactual, TFP markedly declines on the left tail, which we explain via selection mechanisms; on the right, TFP mildly increases as firms are able to expand and reallocate their workforce. We develop a general equilibrium model featuring firm selection and frictions in input markets to guide the evaluation of welfare implications.

Joint with Aslan Bakirov and Paolo Zacchia

> Under revision

▼ Abstract

How much do worker skills, firm pay policies, and their interaction contribute to wage inequality? Standard approaches rely on latent fixed effects identified through worker mobility, but sparse networks inflate variance estimates, additivity assumptions rule out complementarities, and the resulting decompositions lack interpretability. We propose TWICE—Tree-based Wage Inference with Clustering and Estimation—a framework that models the conditional wage function directly from observables using gradient-boosted trees, replacing latent effects with interpretable, observable-anchored partitions. This trades off the ability to capture idiosyncratic unobservables for robustness to sampling noise and out-of-sample portability. Applied to Portuguese administrative data, TWICE outperforms linear benchmarks out of sample and reveals that sorting and non-additive interactions explain substantially more wage dispersion than implied by standard AKM estimates