TOP 3 PUBLICATIONS (BY CITATIONS)
Employment Protection Deregulation and Labor Shares in Advanced Economies (with Romain Duval and Davide Furceri).
Review of Economics and Statistics. November 2022. Vol 104, Issue 6: 1174-1190.
It argues, both theoretically and empirically, that labor market deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s may explain about a tenth of the labor share decline observed in most advanced economies over the last three decades.
Among others, presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association.
Media: Brookings; Sydney Morning Herald; Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
Accepted version here. Online appendix here. Full replication package here. WP version here.
Over 120 Google Scholar citations.
COVID-19 in Italy: an Analysis of Death Registry Data (with Sílvia Garcia-Mandicó).
Journal of Public Health. December 2020. Vol 42, Issue 4: 723-730.
It investigates COVID-19-induced mortality during Italy's first wave using death registry data and finds that the pandemic led to the death of more than 0.15% of the local population in Italy's north. It also shows that official statistics vastly underreport this death toll, by about 60%.
Op-eds: VoxEU.org (most read in May/2020).
Over 110 Google Scholar citations.
Working from Home After COVID-19: Evidence from Job Postings in 20 Countries (with Pawel Adrjan, Michael Koelle, Alexandre Judes, Cyrille Schwellnus and Tara Sinclair).
Labour Economics. October 2025. Vol 96, 102751.
It studies the adoption of WFH after the COVID-19 pandemic using a newly assembled dataset of job postings advertising WFH. It finds that increases in pandemic severity substantially raise WFH but declines have no effect, suggesting that WFH is here to stay.
Among others, presented at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (live streamed).
Op-eds: VoxEU.org; EcoScope; Indeed Hiring Lab; OECD Statistics Blog. Media: Wall Street Journal; Bloomberg; Financial Times; Le Figaro; Les Echos; BFMTV; Sueddeutsche Zeitung; RTE, Irish Examiner; Irish Times.
Online Appendix here. Job postings data here. Full replication package here. WP version here.
Over 70 Google Scholar citations.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Oil Revenues and Labor Market Reforms (with Markus Brueckner and Norman Loayza).
World Development. May 2025.
It shows that positive oil revenue shocks lead autocratic governments to deregulate the labor market, driven by rent extraction and efficiency considerations, while democratic governments use the rents from positive shocks for redistribution and deregulate following negative shocks.
Accepted version here. Online Appendix here. WP version here. Data and replication here.
Austerity and Elections (with Alberto Alesina, Davide Furceri and Giorgio Saponaro)
Economica. May 2024.
It shows that tax hikes have negative electoral effects, while the effects of expenditure cuts depend on whether the government campaigned on a free-market platform. It explains this result developing a model of electoral competition with polarized voter constituencies.
Op-eds: VoxEU.org. WP version here.
Unlocked Potential: Work From Home Job Postings in 20 OECD Countries (with Pawel Adrjan, Alexandre Judes, Michael Koelle, Cyrille Schwellnus and Tara Sinclair).
AEA Papers and Proceedings. May 2023. Vol 113.
It assembles a novel dataset tracking the share of job ads advertising WFH in 20 OECD countries and shows that this share kept rising following the pandemic, reaching more than 11% overall and almost 30% in high-WFH-potential occupations in March 2023.
Data available here.
Is Domestic Uncertainty a Local Pull Factor Driving Foreign Capital Inflows? New Cross-Country Evidence (with Sangyup Choi and Davide Furceri).
Journal of International Money and Finance. February 2023. Vol 130: 102764.
It studies the effect of uncertainty on international capital flows, going beyond U.S. and global uncertainty. It shows that increases in economic and political uncertainty in the recipient country are associated with a reduction in foreign bank credit and portfolio debt inflows.
The Effects of U.S. Monetary Policy on International Mutual Fund Investment (with John Rogers and Wenbin Wu).
Journal of International Money and Finance. October 2022. Vol 127: 102676.
It separates U.S. monetary policy surprises into a pure monetary policy and an information shock component and finds that the two have distinctly different effects on international mutual fund investment and capital flows - negative for the former and marginally positive for the latter.
Among others, presented at the San Francisco Fed 2021 Asia Economic Policy Conference.
Op-eds: VoxEU.org; Ideas for India. WP version here. Shocks data available here (disable VPN/firewalls).
Okun's Law, Development, and Demographics: Differences in the Cyclical Sensitivities of Unemployment Across Economy and Worker Groups (with Zidong An and John Bluedorn).
Applied Economics. 2022. Vol 54, Issue 36: 4227-4239.
It shows that the cyclical sensitivity of unemployment to aggregate demand is more than twice as large in advanced as in emerging market and developing economies, twice as large for the young as for the adults, and significantly lower for women than for men .
WP version here.
When and How Do Business Shutdowns Work? Evidence from Italy's First COVID-19 Wave (with Sílvia Garcia-Mandicó).
Health Economics. September 2022. Vol 31, Issue 9: 1823-1843.
It argues that Italy's business shutdown policy may have reduced the death toll from the first wave of COVID-19 by about 40%, and that shutdowns should (i) be adopted earlier on in the pandemic curve to be most effective, and (ii) only target services activities to minimize economic trade-offs.
WP version here.
Private and Public Risk Sharing in the Euro Area (with Jacopo Cimadomo, Oana Furtuna and Massimo Giuliodori). 2020.
European Economic Review. January 2020. Vol. 121: 103347.
It shows that consumption risk sharing in the Euro Area increased from about 30% in its early years to about 60% in the 2010s, thanks largely to higher financial integration through cross-border porftolio holdings and the provision of official loans to distressed countries.
The Composition Effects of Tax-based Consolidations on Income Inequality (with Ekkehard Ernst, Massimo Giuliodori and Rossana Merola).
European Journal of Political Economy. March 2019. Vol. 57: 107-124.
It studies the inequality effects of increases in taxes and finds that (i) these reduce inequality, but at the cost of weaker economic activity, and (ii) indirect taxes reduce inequality by more than direct taxes, possibly due to the operation of a positive labour supply channel.
WP version here.