More about my research 

I am an applied microeconometrician, with a deep interest in uncertainty, heterogeneity, and measurement, as well as in the connections between how econometricians vis-a-vis individuals in everyday life think about and deal with uncertainty (i.e., make inferences, decisions, etc.). 

Under these unifying themes, I have been investigating a diverse range of microeconomic behaviors related to human capital broadly defined, including high school track choices of Italian families, work-retirement plans of older US workers, long-term care insurance plans of aging Americans, compliance behavior during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, and internal financial planning by CFOs of mid and large US corporations.

As part of my research, I design new measurements to advance modelling and inference about real-life microeconomic behavior, especially individual and multi-agent decisions with uncertain consequences, limited information, or limited choice sets. The leading example of such measurements is survey elicitation of probabilistic subjective expectations. 

A part of my research investigates how individuals think about real-life uncertainties---especially with regards to the evolution of and relationship among choice-relevant variables---and how individuals communicate perceived uncertainty and perceived relationships in economic surveys of expectations. It also studies certain measurement properties of survey expectations and how these affect inference. 

Since graduate school, I have developed an increasing number of survey instruments, some independently and others within teams of collaborators and coauthors. Some of these surveys are embedded in large-scale longitudinal studies such as the U.S. Health and Retirement Study, or online panels such as the American Life Panel. And, thus, they have contributed to the creation of publicly available data that economists and other social scientists can use to advance knowledge. 

Most of my research makes use of microeconomic data collected through purposely designed expectations surveys. I have recently completed a handbook chapter on Expectations in Education for the Elsevier Handbook of Economic Expectations (2023) edited by R. Backmann, G. Topa, and W. van der Klaauw, which reviews the economic literature on survey expectations in the domain of education. A longer version of the chapter, covering formal analytic frameworks and issues of survey elicitation in addition to empirical findings, is also available as a HCEO working paper. The latter also includes a web appendix with an encompassing list of expectations surveys related to education. To learn more, please take a look at my Research tab.