Research papers

Real Exchange Rates and the Earnings of Immigrants (with Christian Dustmann and Hyejin Ku)  [The Economic Journal, 2024]

We relate the reservation wages of newly arrived immigrants to the real price differences or real exchange rate (RER) between the host and source regions. Analyzing longitudinal administrative data that tracks immigrants’ first labor market spells as well as their subsequent career trajectories, we provide concrete evidence that immigrants arriving at high RERs initially settle for lower paying jobs. In subsequent periods, however, they rapidly catch up to those who arrive at lower RERs, primarily through occupational upgrading. Our findings have important consequences for the assessment and interpretation of immigrants’ career profiles and impacts on the labor market.

Do More Tourists Promote Local Employment? (with Libertad González) [Journal of Human Resources, 2025]

We analyze the short-term impact of tourist flows on local labour markets. We propose a novel identification strategy that uses shocks to competing international tourist destinations to instrument for tourist inflows across Spanish regions. We show that negative shocks in alternative international destinations have a strong positive effect on tourism flows to Spain. We follow an instrumental variables strategy and find that an exogenous increase in tourist inflows leads to more employment in the tourism industry for prime-age workers in the short term but does not increase total employment in local economies. Total employment actually falls for very young and older workers, as well as for prime-age women. The increase in employment in tourism is compensated by a fall in (low-skilled) employment in other sectors, especially construction and manufacturing.

 IZA Discussion Paper  17518 (2024)

Double Selection in Causal Inference (with Christian Alemán, Christopher Busch and Raúl Santaeulàlia-Llopis)

We introduce a unified double selection framework accommodating group-specific additive and multiplicative shifters of an unobserved common time trend (CTT). Under double selection, the CTT does not manifest as a parallel trend; the resulting non-constant selection bias is a linear combination nesting standard difference-in-differences (DiD) in levels and logs. Opposing shifters can yield patterns structurally impossible under standard DiDs, such as a ranking reversal of the groups over time. We establish that in the presence of double selection bias treatment effects are non-parametrically identified by the change of the ratio of within-group outcome changes over time. The double selection structure induces a stable linear relationship in the outcome-on-outcome space, grounding a simple two-step estimator operating in levels. Revisiting Card (1992), double selection uncovers valid counterfactuals where standard DiD fails.

The Labor Market Effects of GLP-1s: Evidence from Weight Management and Diabetes Cohorts (with Christian Alemán, Fane Groes, Veda Narasimhan and Raúl Santaeulàlia-Llopis)

Using population-wide administrative microdata from Denmark, we provide the first comprehensive empirical evaluation contrasting the causal labor market effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists across their dual therapeutic tracks: a subsidized diabetic cohort (Ozempic) subject to public reimbursement, and a weight-management cohort (Wegovy) paying entirely out-of-pocket. Exploiting variation in individual prescription timing among eventual users, and validated by a battery of robustness checks leveraging treatment dropouts, alternative insulin baselines, and matched stacked designs, we find robust labor supply expansions that sharply differ by track. For the subsidized diabetes cohort, treatment initiation raises the probability of employment by 4.1 percentage points and quarterly hours worked by 19.5 hours. Conversely, for out-of-pocket weight-management cohorts, employment effects are flat, but the intensive labor supply expands  by 29.7 hours per quarter conditional on employment. Wage effects are statistically insignificant across tracks, confirming that labor earnings gains are quantity-driven. Integrating these micro-elasticities into a public finance accounting framework, we show that price regulations shrink the standalone diabetic deficit, while weight-management cohorts generate substantial, pure income tax windfalls that naturally stabilize public health budgets.

Gender, Careers and Peers' Gender Mix  (with Elena Ashtari Tafti and Mimosa Distefano )

We use Italian Social Security data to study how the gender composition of a worker’s professional network influences their career development. By exploiting variation within firms, occupations, and labor market entry cohorts, we find that young women starting their careers alongside a higher share of female peers experience lower wage growth, fewer promotions and increased transitions into non-employment. In contrast, male workers appear unaffected. The analysis reveals that these gender-specific effects are largely driven by structural differences in the networks of men and women. Networks predominantly composed of women appear to be less effective in the labor market. Women, who experience higher attrition and lower promotion rates, have fewer connections to employment opportunities, and their connections tend to be less valuable. When accounting for these differences, we find that connections among female peers offer a crucial safety net during adverse employment shocks. Our findings highlight the critical role of early-career peers and provide a new perspective on the barriers to career advancement for women

CEP Discussion Paper  ISSN 2042-2695 (2024)

Read our NadaEsGratis post on this research. 

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 888282.

Trade and Occupational Upgrading of Immigrants: Evidence from US-Mexico Trade Liberalization

This paper uses US-Mexico trade liberalization to identify labor market returns to the Mexico-specific soft skills in the US. Exploiting NAFTA-driven trade intensification, triple difference techniques and a highly demanding empirical model, I show that managerial employment became considerably more prevalent among Mexicans in industries more exposed to trade with Mexico. The effect was highly persistent and concentrated among high-skilled Mexicans. The analysis of the established versus recent immigrants points towards complementarity between origin and destination-specific skills. Although appreciation of language skills cannot account for these effects, knowledge of Mexican institutions and networks might have been an important factor.

Unpacking the birth order effects (with Wifag Adnan, Konstantinos Chountas, Fane Groes and Aikaterini Kyriazidou)

This paper reexamines birth order effects and highlights the impact of sibling spillovers. Common models for estimating birth order effects may be misspecified when spillovers exist. Our proposed unified empirical framework considers both birth order effects and sibling spillovers while addressing unobserved family-level heterogeneity. Using data from Germany and Egypt, we identify strong negative birth order effects on years of schooling and negative sibling spillovers. Neglecting sibling interactions substantially overstates birth order effects. Moreover, sibling spillovers suggest that the multiplier effect from sibling interactions diminishes with family size. These findings introduce an additional channel through which family size affects child outcomes.

Work in progress

Gendered Leadership: The Effect of Female CEOs on Firm Performance  (with Mimosa Distefano, Michele Giannola and Libertad González)