Asymmetric Shocks and Heterogenous Workers Mobility - joint with Simon Görlach LINK
If workers differ in geographic mobility, complementarity in production reduces the shock absorption capacity of migration and leads to more polarizing welfare effects of local shocks. We quantify these effects by calibrating a dynamic equilibrium model in which workers differ in skill and migration preference. Migration, on average, compensates for one fifth of the welfare loss following a negative shock in one country, with gains accruing largely to high-skilled workers. Low-skilled workers benefit marginally and sometimes earn lower real wages than without migration. We use the quantified model to examine other integration margins and targeted migration policies.
Choosing Employment Protection: the role of on-the-job search and ability learning
Why would agents insert employment protection in labour contracts?
Within a Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search and matching model with on-the-job search and heterogeneous match-productivity, I show that firms and workers choose employment protection to improve their joint welfare by reducing workers' search intensity. I use this model, augmented with Bayesian learning about a worker's unobserved ability, to explain the coexistence of fixed-term contracts and open-ended contracts in continental Europe, as well as key facts about the distribution of fixed-term contracts in the workforce: (i) their high incidence among young workers; (ii) their correlation with low wages; and (iii) their persistence in a worker's career. I calibrate the model using Italian administrative data, and I perform welfare comparisons between different Employment Protection Legislations. I show that the endogenous nature of the contractual choice plays a key role in the welfare gains of heterogeneous agents.
Third parties and the non-monotonicity of the resource curse: evidence from US military influence and oil value - joint with Giacomo Battiston and Matteo Bizzarri (draft available upon request)
The relationship between resource value and conflict in a territory is affected by the interest of powerful third parties, which could deter aggression. By employing widely-used measures of resource value and geologic predictors of oil presence, as well as measures of third party presence, we show that conflict probability is non-monotonic in the value of oil in a country, in areas under US military influence. As we show, US influence in the data proxies for a higher probability of intervention in case of conflict, which may deter predators from causing conflict in countries with high resource value.
Third Party Interest, Resource Value and the Likelihood of a Conflict - EJPE with Giacomo Battiston and Matteo Bizzarri [LINK]
We build a model of resource war to investigate the impact of a change in the resource value on the likelihood of a conflict. A predator decides if to wage war against a resource holder and seize its resource. A powerful third party can intervene to back the defendant. However, it does not act as a social planner but it maximizes its own profits. Then, the effect of a change in resource value is a priori unclear. On the one hand, increased resource value results in a higher incentive to predate, on the other hand it makes for a higher incentive to intervene by the third party, increasing deterrence. Under general assumptions, we find that the probability of a conflict as a function resource value is hump-shaped. We find empirical grounding for our model using data on interstate and civil conflicts from the MID and PRIO databases, instrumenting resource value with data on sediments from the CRUST database. In work in progress, we are developing a structural version of the model to study quantitatively counterfactual scenarios.
Fertility: the impact of social norms after forced migration - joint with A. Aydemir, G, Battiston and A. E. Sanlituerk
This project aims to investigate how social norms about fertility affect actual fertility behavior as well as intentions to have children among forced migrants. We study the case of Syrian migrants, relocated in Turkey due to the civil conflict that started in 2011. A sample of Syrian refugees was randomized into two treatments and a control groups. The two treatment groups received information on the fertility outcomes for immigrants and natives respectively, while the control group did not receive information. Then, we immediately asked questions regarding their individual fertility intentions and we run a second wave of surveys after 9 months. Preliminary results show a decrease in the intention to have children among refugees after been exposed to information about native fertility outcomes.
The Drivers of EU Unemployment during the Great Recession - joint with Diego Comin, Antonella Trigari, Andrea Pasqualini
We want to study the heterogeneity in the evolution of unemployment in different European countries, trying to quantify the relative contribution of alternative sources of aggregate uncertainty. In particular, we focus on the fluctuations that occurred during the Great Recession and its aftermath. In addition to the more traditional productivity shock, we analyze the effect of a discount factor shock, that has been recently addressed by the literature as a possible explanation of the observed unemployment fluctuations. We then want to study the way in which these shocks interact with the labour market institutions (wage rigidity, labour market duality) of the different European countries, producing the heterogeneity of labour market outcomes that we observe in the data.
Vacancy Yield and Recruitment Strategies - joint with Thomas Le Barbanchon
Using a novel dataset that combines the French employment register data with the posted vacancies at the French Employment Agency, we are able to analyze the relationship between employment growth at the establishment level and vacancy duration, controlling for a large set of vacancy characteristics. We show that the negative correlation found in the literature is robust to our additional controls, such as posted wages, job-titles, labour contracts, experience required. Then, we conduct some preliminary analysis on the recruitment strategies of the firms.