Foreign Direct Investment and Structural Transformation in Africa, The World Bank Economic Review, 2025 (with B. Hoekman and M. Sanfilippo)
Terrorism and the Local Labor Market: Evidence from the Egyptian Tourism Sector (draft coming soon!)
(Awarded the Best Paper presented by a PhD Student at the SITES Conference)
This paper examines the impact of the October 31st, 2015 terrorist attack against tourists in Egypt on the local labor market within the tourism sector. Using the Quarterly Labor Force Survey, I consider social security coverage as a proxy for formal employment. The analysis finds that the attack led to a temporary decline in both overall employment and formal employment in the tourism sector, with no significant impact on informal employment. As a mechanism that may explain this negative relationship, I propose a labor market adjustment driven by the different coping strategies of employees and self-employed workers within the tourism sector.
When Extreme Weather Hits Home: Huaicos and Gender-Based Violence in Peru (with E. Amaya) Submitted
This paper examines how huaicos — extreme weather event increasingly frequent in Andean countries as a consequence of climate change — affect the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV). We link a database containing the geocodes, timing, and intensity of huaicos with the Peruvian Demographic and Health Survey for the 2010–2019 period. Using a sample of eventually treated women and exploiting the gradual and exogenous occurrence of these events, our results show that exposure to high-intensity huaicos increases both general and physical IPV (between 21-26%). Additionally, an event-study analysis reveals that these effects are immediate, persistent and increasing over time. As potential mechanisms, we find that huaicos promote heavy alcohol consumption among women's partners and worsen labor market outcomes by raising informal employment, increasing employment in the primary sector, and lowering wages. These results suggest that social-psychological distress and financial stress are key channels through which extreme weather events affect IPV.
Large Scale Land Acquisitions and Migration in Africa
This paper studies the effect on large scale land acquisitions on migration to South Africa. We exploit the surge in land acquisitions following the 2007-2008 world food price crisis as exogenous treatment. Combining information on country-level land acquisitions with the country-specific share of immigrants in each South African district, we assess whether an increase in the size of land acquisitions has an impact on migration inflows. Results suggest that an increase in land grabbing events leads to an increase in migration to South Africa. In particular, the impact is greater when we consider the concluded deals in operation in agriculture. Heterogeneity analysis shows that individuals coming from English-speaking countries are more likely to migrate to South Africa, while results do not seem to hold when we consider only immigration from border countries.
How Much Is Road Safety Worth? Evidence from Real Estate Prices (with L. Sabatino) Submitted
This paper studies whether road safety is capitalized into property values. We combine unique geo-referenced data on the universe of road accidents with real estate transaction data from a major Italian city. To identify causal effects, we employ an instrumental variables (IV) strategy that exploits the staggered deployment of automated red-light cameras across neighborhoods over time. Our results show that road safety has a significant effect on property values: one additional road accident reduces average property values by 0.19%. This effect is entirely driven by residential properties, for which an additional accident lowers prices by 0.34%, consistent with households valuing safer neighborhoods. Further evidence based on pedestrian injuries supports a neighborhood-safety mechanism, suggesting that households internalize local road-safety risks when valuing residential locations. Overall, our findings indicate that improvements in urban road safety generate economic benefits that extend beyond the direct reduction in accidents and injuries.
The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on Employment in Ghana: A Sectoral Perspective
Do rising temperatures affect structural transformation in Africa?