Mobile Money Fees  

with Markus Brunnermeier (Princeton) & Nicola Limodio (Bocconi)  

The literature on mobile money lacks information on the fee structure of operators. A comprehensive dataset on mobile money operators’ tariffs does not exist, and hence we are the first to introduce such a dataset, comprehensive of all mobile money service providers operating in Africa. We collected monthly data on each operator’s fees, spanning the year 2010-2022. The main source of our data is the website of each Mobile Money provider, as the tariff plans are usually available not only to the agent offices but also online. However, operators rarely keep their past fees structure publicly available on their website: to overcome this issue, we rely on multiple Wayback Machines, which are a tool that enables the recovery of web pages that are no longer available. 

Italian Mass Migration to the US

Individual-Level Data from Ellis Island  

with Davide Coluccia (Northwestern)  

Between 1890 and 1924 more than four million Italians emigrated to the United States. During this period, Italy was the single largest supplier of emigrants in the world. This dataset tracks Italians who arrived in the Ellis Island immigration station between 1892 and 1924. We collect individual-level information on 3.6 million immigrants, including immigration year, literacy status, municipality of origin, and age. In ongoing work, we are leveraging census linking algorithms to merge the resulting dataset with individual-level historical (US) census data. This will yield a novel tool to study a broad set of questions concerning one of the defining immigrant group in (historical) American society.