Publications

Aging Population and Technology Adoption  - accepted at Review of Economic Studies

Population aging affects labor supply, interest rates, and the skill composition of workers, altering technology adoption incentives. A dynamic general equilibrium task-based model of endogenous technology and skill acquisition shows that the impact of aging on technology depends on the underlying age structure of the population. When the population is young, aging boosts the adoption of labor-saving and skill-intensive new technology. Conversely, when the population is old, aging reduces new technology adoption, describing a hump-shaped relationship between age and new technology. The model, calibrated to European data, shows that aging significantly drove new technology adoption from 1990 to 2015, but caused a slowdown thereafter. Aging also influences the skill premium by affecting the demand and supply of skilled labor, thereby increasing inequality. Additionally, the aging-induced rise in retirement age slows new technology adoption and labor productivity growth. Policies that mitigate retirement age increases can lead to Pareto improvements.

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Working Papers

Fiscal policy and human capital in the race against the machine (with Niemann S. & von Muschwitz F.)
We study fiscal policy in a dynamic growth model with endogenous automation, education choice, and human-capital formation through public and private inputs. Automation raises productivity and growth, but increases wage inequality. For a given breakdown of public expenditures into transfer payments and education spending, taxation has implications for redistribution and human capital formation, with countervailing effects on inequality. The interaction of these effects depends on the tax instrument (labor versus robot tax) as well as the importance of private contributions to higher education. When private contributions to higher education are sizable, the welfare-maximizing tax policy over time is characterized by a declining labor tax and a robot tax that is initially negative before turning positive in the long-run. When higher education is predominantly financed publicly, instead, the optimal robot tax remains positive throughout, while the labor tax stabilizes at a substantially higher level.

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The Macroeconomics of Aging Consumers: the Competition Channel (with Brès M.)
Population aging affects product-market competition through demand composition. A search model of competition, disciplined by evidence on life-cycle differences in substitution behavior and search intensity, predicts non-monotone effects: aging from young to middle age weakens between-market competition, while aging into retirement strengthens within-market competition. Consistent with the model, a shift-share IV combining foreign demographic shifts with predetermined sectoral exposure finds that middle-aged demand raises prices and profit shares but lowers output. In a U.S.-calibrated general-equilibrium analysis, this competition channel lowers real GDP by up to 1.2 percent, peaking in the mid-2010s before partly reversing as baby boomers enter retirement.
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Endogenous Fertility and Retirement Age (with Addessi W. and Delogu M.)
As people age, preferences become more inelastic, and the opportunity cost of time drops after retirement. Demographic shifts, therefore, alter the aggregate demand and affect the market structure and growth. Using unpredicted foreign demographic changes, we isolate demand-side effects and observe that middle-aged consumers reduce competition, leading to declining production growth while young and old consumers have the opposite effect, i.e., aging consumers has a non-monotonic effect on competition and production growth. Our three-agent multi-sector general equilibrium search model shows that while young consumers enhance between-varieties competition and old consumers enhance within-varieties competition, middle-aged consumers reduce competition and shift demand to less productive firms, lowering growth. Our estimates show that changes in the age composition of consumers led to an 8.7\% reduction in the United States GDP growth from 1995-2004 and a 10.3\% increase from 2005-2019 due to baby boomers aging.

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Work in Progress

• Aging, Technology, and Migration - with Boeri F. (City St George's, University of London)

• Aging, Institutions, and Growth - with Prettner K. (WU, Vienna University of Economics and Business) and von Muschwitz (WZB, Berlin Social Science Center)

• Voting on Automation - with Niemann S. (University of Konstanz) and von Muschwitz F. (Berlin Social Science Center)

• From Robots to AI? Aging-Directed Technological Change

 Teaching

University of Vienna

• Course: Applied Macroeconomics UE (2024) 

University of Konstanz

• Course: Technological Change, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence (2022,2023) 

• Course: Introduction to Matlab for Macroeconomics (2021, 2022, 2023)

• Master Seminar: Hot Topics in Macro Labor (2022, 2023)

• Reading Group:  Hot Topics in Economics (2022)

• Bachelor Seminar: The Economics of Technological Change (2023)   

University of Rome Tor Vergata

• Teaching Assistant (Prof. Daniela Vuri): Microeconomics (2021)

New York University (Florence)

• Teaching Assistant (Prof. Giampiero Gallo): International Economics (2018, 2019)

 Awards

 Teaching Award of the Department of Economics for Young Scientists
 University of  Konstanz,  2023