Research

Employment Protection and Consumption: Evidence from Italy

Leveraging an Italian labor market reform known as the Jobs Act (JA), I study how employment risk affects household consumption and labor supply. The JA reduced protection against individual termination only for workers hired on or after March 7, 2015, by firms with at least 15 employees. Using this time-based discontinuity in employment protection as exogenous variation in employment risk, I find that workers subject to the reform consume 8% less than workers hired through March 6, 2015, who were not exposed to the reform. By contrast, I find no significant effect on weekly hours worked. I use this empirical result to estimate a standard incomplete-markets model with ex-ante heterogeneity in employment risk. Replicating the empirical analysis in a simulated dataset and controlling for permanent income, I find that risk explains about one third of the reduced-form effect on consumption. Finally, I use the model to show that providing more generous unemployment insurance to workers exposed to the reform and less to unexposed workers, keeping the government’s budget constraint fixed, maximizes welfare and reduces consumption inequality.

Grants: Fulbright Visiting Scholarship - Fulbright Italy

Presented at: CSEF Internal PhD Seminar (March 2024, November 2025), Stanford PhD Macro Lunch (March 2025), 5th Sailing the Macro Workshop, 40th AIEL  Annual Conference - University of Milano-Bicocca (September 2025), 23rd Brucchi-Luchino Labor Economic Workshop - University of Padua (December 2025), Ca' Foscari Internal Seminars (January 2026), 21st Doctorissimes - Universitè Paris 1 Panthèon-Sorbonne (April 2026), 2nd HYRCE - HEC Liege (April 2026), EALE Tour 2026 (Local PhD Students Flash Talks) - University of Naples Federico II (May 2026), XXIX Dynamic Macroeconomics Workshop - Vigo (June 2026), 41 EEA Meeting - UCD (August 2026), 4th and 5th NSE PhD and Postdoctoral Workshop (September 2025 and 2026)

Retirement and Portfolio Choices: Evidence from Italian Households (with Nicol Barbieri)

This paper examines how retirement affects household portfolio allocation using rich panel data from the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) from 2012 to 2022. Exploiting exogenous variation in pension eligibility rules, we estimate a 2SLS with individual and time fixed effects to identify the causal impact of retirement on stock holdings. We find that when the head retires, households increase the share of financial wealth invested in stocks by more than 7 percentage points. This result contrasts sharply with standard portfolio choice theory, which predicts a decreasing equity share with age, but aligns with recent evidence of a negative relationship between background risk and households’ stock market participation. When people retire, they are no longer exposed to employment risk. Therefore, they can afford to ”replace” their background risk with financial risk if they are not close to the liquidity constraint. This effect is driven by wealthy retirees who had stable careers without unemployment spells. In contrast, poor liquidity-constrained retirees not only invest less in financial markets, but also reduce consumption upon retirement.

Presented at: 6th Sailing the Macro Workshop (September 2026)

Retirement and the Demographic Transition: a Survey Experiment

Do individuals incorporate information about the national pension system into their retirement expectations and investment decisions? Using a novel representative sample of working Italians aged 15 to 75, this paper exploits exogenous variation in information by randomly exposing half of the sample to news about the pension system. I show that, on average, treated individuals revise their expected retirement age upward by 6 months and decrease their expected social security wealth by around 5%. Leveraging the Survey RCT as a first stage, I estimate the degree of substitutability between public pension wealth and private pension plans. I find very little substitutability, especially among individuals with low financial literacy.

Presented at: Naples School of Economics Summer School in Economics and Finance (Poster Session, June 2025), CSEF Internal PhD Seminar (March 2026), 2nd Workshop on Frontiers in Measurement and Survey Methods - University of Calabria (Poster Session, May 2026)

The Impact of Subsidies on Real Estate Renovations on Consumption: the Italian "Superbonus 110" (with Massimiliano Sfregola)