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

• Who Benefits from Immigration? Firm Responses to Immigration under Imperfect Input Markets (with M. Caselli, M. Mertens and L. Nesta)

We study how firms respond to immigration shocks and how these responses translate into adjustments in input and output market rents for firms, their workers, and their consumers . Using detailed information on French manufacturing firms (2009-2019), we estimate labor input wedges for native and foreign workers. Wedges are larger for foreign workers, consistent with firms having more labor market power over foreigners. We find that both labor types are imperfect substitutes. Immigration shocks reduce the wages of both worker types, with smaller effects for native workers.

• Trade-related vulnerabilities and the controversial boundaries of Member States' economic security in the EU (with A. Fracasso)

Growing geopolitical tensions have renewed interest in trade-related vulnerabilities as a component of economic security. However, the lack of a well-defined conceptual framework around the concept of economic security implies the co-existence of different definitions, shifting boundaries and fuzzy policy prescriptions. Recent empirical work has developed product-level indicators of external dependence, typically combining information on import concentration, global supply concentration, and domestic substitutability. These methodologies are generally designed either for sovereign States or for the European Union treated as a single integrated area. This paper argues that they cannot be directly replicated to assess vulnerabilities at the level of individual EU Member States. The paper's methodological contribution shows that the EU's quasi-federal nature creates specific conceptual and measurement problems for Member State assessments, especially concerning the treatment of intra-EU sourcing in the construction of concentration and substitutability indicators. These choices affect the internal coherence of vulnerability metrics and reflect prior judgments about whether the relevant threat is economic coercion, broader supply disruption, or both. An empirical section applies one of the existing methodologies to  highly disaggregated trade data to illustrate the impact of  alternative treatments of intra-EU trade and compare different results. 

• 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.