Job market paper

Who You Owe Matters: Corporate Debt Structure and Employment Recovery (most recent version)

Since the 1990s, U.S. economic recoveries have become jobless. Over the same period, firms have shifted from relationship-based bank lending toward arm’s-length bond financing. This paper proposes a financial channel linking these two trends. Using firm-level data I exploit predetermined long-term debt maturity schedules across crisis episodes to decompose refinancing shocks into maturing public debt versus maturing loans. The central finding is that it is not refinancing pressure per se that suppresses hiring, but specifically the type of debt: firms with pre-determined maturing public debt obligations experience significantly lower and more persistent employment losses during the recovery period than firms with comparable maturing bank debt. The results are consistent with a mechanism of rollover rigidity: dispersed bondholders face coordination failures that preclude renegotiation, forcing firms to cut labor rather than restructure debt - the rollover-rigidity channel. This channel is rationalized in a simple structural model of employment adjustment under debt rigidity. The findings in this paper offer a corporate finance explanation for the worsening of employment recoveries as market-based financing has expanded. 

Selected presentations (all personally presented): University of Lausanne, Switzerland (2026)

Working papers

The Spillovers of LSAPs on Banks in the Euro Area (most recent version)

(with Marco Graziano and Andreas Tischbirek)

We study the spillovers of large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs) in the U.S. on financial intermediation in the euro area using bank-level supervisory data and high-frequency identified policy surprises. Our detailed panel data permit us to trace the impact of LSAPs through bank balance sheets. We find that the Federal Reserve affects credit provision in the euro area through a channel that we refer to as the “international bank capital channel” of unconventional monetary policy. In response to an LSAP shock that leads to a steepening of the U.S. Treasury yield curve, the Treasury positions of euro area banks shrink, capital ratios worsen, and banks that are less well capitalized contract their lending relative to banks that are better capitalized. Our results are consistent with an important role of revaluation effects, imperfect risk hedging, and credit as an adjustment margin for banks in the proximity of regulatory capital constraints.

Fed Board WP; CESifo WP

Selected presentations (* personally presented): Royal Economic Society Annual Conference, United Kingdom (2026); University of Basel, Switzerland (2026);  Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, USA (2026); 2024 SNB Research Conference, Switzerland (2024); Bank for International Settlements, Switzerland (2024)*; Young Swiss Economists Meeting 2024 KOF at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland (2024)*; 16th UNITO - CCA PhD Workshop in Economics, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy (2023)*; Study Center Gerzensee, Switzerland (2023)*; University of Lausanne, Switzerland (2023)*

Labour market flows, unemployment, and the Phillips curve (most recent version) [more details]

(with Enisse Kharroubi)

We provide empirical evidence for the United States that labour market flows provide valuable information for subsequent wage and price inflation, over and above standard measures of labour market tightness. Specifically, we introduce a novel measure of labour market momentum (LMM), defined as the difference between the observed unemployment rate and the unemployment rate implied by current labour market transitions (low-based unemployment). Empirically, inflationary pressures tend to expand when LMM strengthens, i.e., when flow-based unemployment falls below stock-based unemployment. We then develop a search-and-matching model incorporating nominal wage rigidities and persistent (non-i.i.d.) shocks. In this framework, firms facing wage rigidities still retain the ability to negotiate wages with new hires, making firms' bargaining power endogenous and dependent on both stock- and flow-based unemployment. Consistent with our empirical results, weaker LMM typically leads to lower wages, and the longer so, the more persistent the shocks to the underlying transition probabilities.

BIS WP

Selected presentations (* personally presented): American Economic Association, Philadelphia, United States (2026)*; 15th BIS Consultative Council for the Americas Annual Research Conference on Labour markets, Mexico (2025); 40th EEA Congress, Bordeaux School of Economics, France (2025)*; University of Lausanne, Switzerland (2025)*; Bank for International Settlements, Switzerland (2025); Study Center Gerzensee, Switzerland (2025)*

Work in progress

The global nonlinear inflation shocks (WP coming soon)

(with Ozge Akinci, Gianluca Benigno, and Hunter Clark)

What role do global shocks play in the recent surge in inflation, and does the size of those shocks matter? This paper examines the transmission mechanisms of global supply chain disruptions, global demand pressures, and oil supply shocks on consumer, producer, and core inflation across 22 advanced economies. Employing local projection methods at the individual country, principal component, and panel levels, we first establish that global supply chain pressures were the dominant driver of the 2021–2022 inflation surge, with global demand playing a lesser but still notable role. We then extend the analysis to allow for nonlinear effects by testing whether large shocks have disproportionate inflationary consequences. Our central finding is that the inflation response to global shocks is nonlinear for supply chain disruptions but approximately linear for oil and demand shocks. Large supply chain shocks generate significantly more persistent inflationary dynamics—especially for core inflation—consistent with second-round wage and expectation effects that are only triggered once disruptions exceed a critical threshold. A nonlinear historical decomposition confirms that accounting for the extreme size of pandemic- era supply shocks substantially reduces the unexplained share of the 2021–2022 inflation episode.

Selected presentations (* personally presented): BIS-CEBRA-CEPR-UniBS Conference on Heterogeneity and Inflation, Switzerland (2026)*; Bank of Italy Conference I 36th SUERF Colloquium, Italy (2024)

Unintended effects of climate-finance policies? Cross-border arbitrage and financial flows

Global credit spreads (with Simon Gilchrist, Benoît Mojon, and Egon Zakrajšek)