Employment Protection and Consumption: Evidence from Italy

Leveraging an Italian labour market reform known as the Jobs Act (JA), I study the effect of employment risk on household consumption and labour supply. The JA reduced protection against individual termination only for workers hired after March 6, 2015, by firms with at least 15 employees. Using this time-based discontinuity in employment protection as a source of exogenous variation in employment risk, I find that workers subject to the reform consume 8% less than workers hired before March 6, 2015. On the other hand, there is no significant effect on weekly hours worked. I use the empirical result to discipline a standard incomplete market model with ex-ante heterogeneity in employment risk. Assuming CRRA preferences, I estimate a relative risk aversion of around 1.5 and a discount factor of 0.97. Replicating the empirical analysis in a simulated dataset and controlling for permanent income, risk explains about one third of the reduced-form effect on consumption. Finally, I show that providing more insurance to workers with higher exposure to employment risk 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 studies how retirement affects household portfolio allocation using rich panel data from the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) between 2012 and 2022. Exploiting exogenous variation in pension eligibility rules, we estimate a two-stage least squares with individual and time fixed effects to identify the causal impact of retirement on financial investment behavior. We find that retirement leads to a significant increase in stock holdings: the share of financial wealth invested in stocks rises by 8.2 percentage points, and the probability of participating in the stock market increases by 23 percentage points. This reallocation is mostly driven by publicly traded stocks. We interpret these findings through the lens of precautionary saving: as retirement reduces income risk exposure, the incentive to hold liquid, low-return assets weakens, and people shift toward higher-yielding investments. This effect is particularly pronounced for seniority-eligible individuals - i.e., those with longer, more stable career paths and higher pension benefits - while it is not statistically significant among old-age retirees, who are more likely to have experienced long unemployment spells and remain liquidity-constrained.

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

Retirement and the Demographic Transition: a Survey Experiment    [Draft available soon]  [Poster]

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 treated individuals increase, on average, 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 and no significant 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)