Publications

This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on immigrant children's cognitive outcomes. Our analysis makes use of administrative data on the entire population of students in the fifth grade, collected by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational System (INVALSI) for school years 2014/2015 to 2016/2017, matched to unique administrative records on early childcare availability at the municipal level. Our identification strategy exploits cross-sectional and time series variation in the provision of early childcare service across Italian municipalities as an instrument for individual attendance. Our results point out that the effect of early childcare attendance differs between native and immigrant children. Estimates show a positive and significant effect on the language test scores of immigrant children, with the effect being mostly driven by females, by children with low-educated mothers and by children who, at home, speak a language highly dissimilar to Italian. Unlike immigrants, native students are negatively impacted by early childcare attendance, as reflected in both language and math test scores. Effects are stronger on math test scores for females and for children with highly educated mothers.

 Media Coverage:  Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Agence France Presse 

Using longitudinal data from the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI) this paper empirically investigates whether the ability of classmates affects immigrant students’ educational achievements. We focus not only on average peer quality in the class, but we further investigate which part of the ability distribution of peers drives the effect by looking at the role played by the extreme tails of the ability distribution. Our empirical strategy addresses students’ endogenous sorting into classes by exploiting the within-pupil across-subjects variation in achievements and the simultaneity problem by using predetermined measures of peers’ ability. We show that peers’ quality matters and that immigrant children are detrimentally affected by the fraction of very low achievers in the class, while native students are mostly affected by the average quality of peers. Our findings provide valuable guidance to policymakers on how to allocate students to classes in order to foster immigrant students integration and learning.



Media Coverage: lavoce.info; Rai Radio 3 interview for "Fahrenheit" (from 1:35:00) 


This paper shows that austerity spending cuts harmed student performance in standardised national tests. To identify this relationship, we use cross-municipality variation in the timing of eligibility for the Italian Domestic Stability Pact as an exogenous shifter of local public spending. We then compare test scores for students that were from the same municipality, but who were exposed to different levels of austerity cuts based on their birth year. Combining administrative data on public spending and test scores with an instrumental variable model, we show that the test score impact from austerity spending cuts is around 5.1% of a standard deviation in math and 4.6% in reading. These effects are more pronounced for children with limited resources at home. We provide suggestive evidence that school budget cuts account for most of the observed test score impact.



Media Coverage: lavoce.info,  il Gazzettino; le Scienze; ANSA; and many others.


We develop an identification strategy for the causal effect of working from home on mental health leveraging policy-induced variation during the Covid-19 pandemic. We overcome endogeneity by combining longitudinal microdata with the cross-sectional variation in the feasibility of remote working across occupations and in the legal restrictions to in presence work across sectors. In our sample of 50+ Europeans, remote working increases feelings of sadness and depression, especially for women, parents with adult children at home, and in regions with strict containment measures and low excess mortality.


Working papers


1. "Rebalancing power asymmetries within firms: evidence from illegal resignations" (Awarded with the 2021 VisitINPS Fellowship) with Alessandra Casarico and Irene Ferrari.  CesIfo WP


We document the extent of employer abuse of power and characterise the employers most likely to engage in abusive relationships with their employees. We leverage an Italian reform that changed the process for submitting voluntary resignations from a paper-based system to an online one. This reform aimed to curb the illegal practice of requiring workers to sign undated resignation letters, which employers could later use at their discretion to avoid the costs associated with dismissals - a clear manifestation of power abuse. Using difference-in-differences estimation, we document that resignations declined more in firms with higher shares of vulnerable workers, those operating in weaker local labour markets, and those with lower productivity. Both firms and workers adjusted their behaviour in response to the reform. Firms reduced overall hiring, with no evidence of differential effects by worker demographics, suggesting that cost-saving motives rather than taste-based discrimination drove their response. At the worker-level, we observe a decrease in workplace injuries, indicating that the reform strengthened workers’ bargaining power and improved overall workplace safety.


Selected work in progress


Other Publications