Working papers
Working papers
With honors. University Honors Programs and Graduates' Careers with Luca Favero [Job market paper]
Quality in tertiary education pays off. In countries with competitive tertiary education, elite flagship institutions attract high-achieving students. Not all bright students, however, access elite institutions. Can honors programs be an alternative way to nurture talent? This paper studies the causal impact of attending an honors program offered to high-achieving students at a non-selective university in a context with non-competitive tertiary institutions. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the program's admission procedure, which leads to a strong discontinuity in the probability of admission and enrollment. We show the program works as a commitment device, reducing dropout rates and time to graduation for admitted students, but does not significantly affect enrollment decisions. Moreover, enrolment into the program leads to a sizeable improvement in academic achievement (+0.93 GPA points on a scale of 30) and shapes future labour market prospects towards post-graduate studies (+22 pp). Prospects are partially confirmed by a reduction (-34 pp) in master's graduates' labour force participation one year after graduation. We find evidence of a peer effect mechanism, with honors students living in dorms with a higher rate of fellow honors students displaying stronger positive effects on academics, while the program's multidisciplinary component shows no effect on students' final theses citation patterns. According to our findings, honors programs can be an effective tool to improve educational attainment and foster further human capital accumulation in talented students.
Presented at 2025 World Labor Conference EALE/SOLE*, 2025 Milan PhD conference, 2023 IZA Summer School in Labor Economics, 2023 CESifo / ifo Junior Workshop on the Economics of Education, 2023 Meeting of Young Economists*, 2023 European Economic Association conference, 2023 Inaugural Essex PhD conference in Applied Economics, 2023 Italian Public Economics Association, 2023 Italian Labor Economics Association
Media coverage Econopoly - Il Sole 24 ore (Italian)
Awarded the 2023 Tortuga Call for Policy Papers
*indicates presentation by co-author
Next job: Matera. How tourism and spotlight shape the local labor market with Luca Favero [Reject and Resubmit at Regional Studies and Urban Economics]
Tourism is an important, cross-cutting source of income and employment. As a potential tool for development, several governmental and intergovernmental initiatives have been put into place to foster tourism. We study the causal link between hosting a mega cultural event, tourism and economic expansion. We document evidence of profound labour market and economic development exploiting the exogenous variation arising from the shortlisting and subsequent nomination to the 2019 European Capital of Culture. The title was awarded to Matera, a culturally rich yet poorly connected and off-beat town in southern Italy. By means of event study regressions and permutation tests, we compare changes in Matera to changes in other Italian cities unaffected by the policy. We nd a boost in tourist presence, which then translates into an increase in firms and workers in industrial sectors even loosely connected with tourism, a decrease in overall unemployment, an increase in income, and a remarkable hike in the real estate market. By analyzing the timing of these impacts, we nd evidence of a spotlight effect: Matera starts benefiting from the event since the selection phase, even before being awarded the title, possibly due to increased media exposure. All in all, our findings suggest that leveraging tourism through events like the European Capital of Culture can provide a credible pathway to development for culturally rich but underrated destinations, particularly those with higher-than-average local unemployment levels ready to be absorbed.
Presented at 2023 Giorgio Rota Conference, 2022 European Meeting of the Urban Economics Association (LSE), 2022 RDG Doctoral Conference in Economics, 2022 COMPIE* (Counterfactual Methods for Policy Impact Evaluation, Mannheim)
Awarded XI Giorgio Rota best paper award
*indicates presentation by co-author
It is never too late. Televised classes and adult skill acquisition
Can voluntary, remote adult training effectively lead to (basic) skill acquisition? Does it matter if education comes later in life? I investigate the impact of televised classes specifically geared to illiterate adult workers on literacy rates in 1960s Italy. Exploiting newly digitized Census data and TV signal exposure differences due to an expanding national TV system and geographical constraints in a continuous differences in differences setting, I find that going from 0% to 100% of the population within a municipality being served by TV signal leads to a 1 percentage point increase in literacy rates. This explains 18% of the increase in average literacy rate that happened around the educational TV program airing years. While this estimate increases to 1.6 percentage points if we consider men only, estimates are not statistically different from zero if we only consider women, likely due to gender norms preventing access to communal TVs for women.
Presented at 2024 Conference of the Italian Association of Labour Economics, 2024 Do.Re.Mee Seminar (Dondena, Bocconi), WISE 2025 (Università della Svizzera Italiana), 2025 Conference of the Italian Association of Labour Economics
Draft available soon!