Research

Publications

The Housing Boom and Selection into Entrepreneurship  (joint with Pierluca Pannella) [pdf]
Labour Economics, vol.85, December 2023

Spouses, Children and Entrepreneurship (joint with Charles Berubé) [pdf]
International Economic Review, vol.64, August 2023

Unemployment, Entrepreneurship and Firm Outcomes [pdf]
Review of Economic Dynamics, vol.45, July 2022

Match Quality and Contractual Sorting (joint with Giovanni Gallipoli and Yaniv Yedid-Levi) [pdf] 
Labour Economics, vol.66, October 2020

Working Papers

Accident-Induced Absence from Work and Wage Growth (joint with Anikó Bíró, Márta Bisztray and Tímea Molnár) [latest version][CIREQ WP][IZA WP]

To analyze how short absences from work affect workers' labor trajectory, we use linked employer-employee administrative data from Hungary with rich administrative health records, and unexpected and mild accidents with no permanent labor productivity losses as exogenous drivers of short absences. Our Event Study results show that, relative to the counterfactual of no accident, even short (1--5-months long) periods of absence after accidents decrease wages by 1.1 percent two years after return to work, and workers end up with lower-paying firms. Missed opportunities to move to higher-paying firms account for half of the wage loss.

How are wages determined? A quasi-experimental test of wage determination theories (joint with Rogério Santarrosa and Marcelo Carvalho) [latest version] [RCEA WP]

We use novel quasi-experimental variation to (i) test whether firm-specific demand shocks impact wages, and (ii) to disentangle predictions coming from wage bargaining and firm upward sloping labor supply curve (wage posting). We use a unique institutional feature of public procurement auctions in Brazil: the moment in which the auction ends is random. Under this setting, for close auctions in which firms are constantly outbidding each other by incremental amounts, winner and runner-up are as good as randomly assigned. Using this first variation, we find that winning a government contract increases wages. In addition, contract value is higher for auctions that (randomly) end earlier. We use these two sources of exogenous variation to disentangle the effect on wages that comes from changes in firm size (wage posting) and the part that comes from changes in contract value holding size constant (bargaining). We find direct evidence of bargaining.

Entrepreneurship, Outside Options and Constrained Efficiency (joint with Iain Snoddy)  [pdf]

The literature on search often adopts the assumption of free entry. We forgo this restriction with a framework in which individuals are constantly making the decision whether to open a firm. Namely, business-owners and workers come from the same pool. We show that in this framework, the Nash bargaining parameter is crucial for internal dynamics. In particular, the wage is no longer unambiguously positively related to the value of unemployment. The constrained efficient solution coincides with the Hosios condition. However, at this efficient solution, changes in the unemployment rate are either exacerbated or muted depending on the match elasticity parameter.


Work in Progress

The Impact of Immigration on Job Creation in the Receiving Economy (joint with David Green)