🏆 Project selected for the VisitINPS 2019 program
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.
📄 Paper
joint with Paolo Zacchia
🏆 Project selected for the VisitINPS 2020 program
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.
⏳ Submitted! 📄 Paper
joint with Marco Francischello and Matteo Paradisi
🏆 Project awarded with a Netspar Comparative Research Grant 2021
We develop an OLG model with heterogeneous agents and aggregate uncertainty to study optimal Ramsey taxation when the government can use a credible set of social security instruments. Social security mitigates the income effect in optimal labor tax smoothing and, together with heterogeneity, adds new redistributive motives to both labor and capital taxes while crowding out others. We calibrate the model on three different economies: the US, Netherlands, and Italy. We argue that the three countries would experience heterogeneous gains, in redistributive and efficiency terms, by moving from the status-quo allocations to those prescribed by a utilitarian Ramsey planner. Our simulations show that retirement benefits in the current economies are higher than their Ramsey-optimal level while we argue that the use of funded social security schemes, neglected in current actual policies, could be welfare improving.
📄 Paper
joint with Marc Fleurbaey
🏆 Project selected for the VisitINPS 2023 program
joint with Paolo Zacchia
🏆 Project selected for the VisitINPS 2023 program
joint with Aslan Bakirov and Paolo Zacchia
joint with Marco Francischello
joint with Matteo Paradisi
Istituto Bruno Leoni, Briefing Papers 🗞️ Media coverage: Il Foglio
📄 Paper