Current Research

• Projet: Food Connections - Intended and unintended consequences of trade on food and nutrition security

The main objective of the project is to bring together competences from economics, law and computer science to enhance our understanding of the role played by international trade, and by the rules that govern it, in linking two crucial societal challenges, namely environmental sustainability, and food and nutrition security. These interactions lie at the core of both Sustainable Development Goal number 2, which aims to “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”. Moreover, the link between the environment and human health has been identified as a critical juncture in which it is necessary to improve our understanding of the complex set of interactions at play, and to promote collaboration across disciplines (see for instance the 2015 Report by the Lancet-Rockefeller Commission on Planetary Health).
Funded by Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca - bando PRIN 2022 PNRR

•  Regulatory Alignment or Divergence? Food Security Provisions in the Agreement on Agriculture and in Preferential Trade Agreements (with M. Alabrese, F. Coli and E. van Ommeren)

The paper contributes to the discussion on the link between international trade policy and food and nutrition security, by looking at whether and how these concepts are addressed in preferential trade agreements (PTAs). We compile a dataset covering almost 600 PTAs that entered into force between 1948 and 2024, and apply textual analysis to show that the number of references to food security has increased over recent decades. To analyse the role of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) in shaping the rules and practices of international food  trade  we  investigate  the  placement,  function,  and  significance  of  food  security provisions in four case studies, looking at the extent to which the regulatory approaches of these PTAs align with or diverge from the relevant provisions of the WTO AoA. Our study reveals that, despite the growing prominence of food security and nutrition in PTAs, their regulatory approaches largely align with the AoA and seldom overcome its shortcomings. While some agreements introduce broader and more contemporary understandings of food security, binding commitments remain limited, and structural tensions between national and global objectives persist.

• Labor Market Imperfections and Reforms: Evidence from Italy (with M. Caselli and A. Locatelli)

The paper investigates the impact of two major labor market reforms enacted in Italy during the 2010s on labor market imperfections. Building on recent methodological advances in the estimation of markups and markdowns, we estimate firm-level measures of the labor wedge, defi ned as the ratio between the marginal revenue product of labor and its unit cost. Exploiting the institutional setup of the reforms, which affected differently firms above or below a 15-employee threshold, we adopt a difference-in-differences framework to assess whether the reduction in employment protection legislation altered the degree of labor market imperfections. Results show that the reforms increased firms’ monopsony power, in line with a simple theoretical framework. The effect is stronger vis-à-vis white-collar workers compared to blue-collar ones.

• Do banks lend more to exporting firms? The effect of foreign market penetration on credit supply and demand (with P. Sevestre)

This paper investigates whether and how foreign market penetration influences the demand for credit by manufacturing firms, and its supply by  banks.We expect exporters to ask for more credit in order to finance the sunk entry costs into foreign markets. For what concerns credit supply, exporting may send a signal about firm-type, which is used by banks to grant more/less credit to exporters based on their perceived quality or riskiness. We find that exporting firms tend to demand more bank credit. Moreover, whereas the total number of  destinations served by a firm does not have a significant impact  on credit supply, the ability to sell in non-EU OECD countries is positively perceived  by banks, and thus improves a firm's access to credit, even after controlling for a number of firm characteristics (profitability, size, the amount of available collateral, etc.). However, the impact of foreign market penetration is not always benign: exporting t

• Pareto versus lognormal: a maximum entropy test (with M. Bee and M. Riccaboni), Discussion Paper 2011.2, Department of Economics, University of Trento (published in Physical Review E, 84, 026104)- [link to Matlab code used in the article]

It is commonly found that distributions that seem to be lognormal over a broad range change to a power-law (Pareto) distribution for the last few percentiles. The distributions of species abundance, income and wealth as well as file, city and firm sizes are examples with this structure. We present a new test for the occurrence of power-law tails in statistical distributions based on maximum entropy. This methodology allows to identify the true data generating processes even in the case when it is neither lognormal nor Pareto. The maximum entropy approach is then compared with alternative methods at different levels of aggregation of economic systems. Our results provide support to the theory that distributions with lognormal body and Pareto tail can be generated as mixtures of lognormally distributed units.