Research

Publications

Life-Cycle Wage Growth Across Countries 

Journal of Political Economy, 2018

We document how life-cycle wage growth varies across countries. We harmonize repeated cross-sectional surveys from countries of all income levels and show that experience-wage profiles are on average twice as steep in rich countries as in poor countries.

Life-Cycle Human Capital Accumulation Across Countries: Lessons from U.S. Immigrants 

Journal of Human Capital’s special edition honoring Gary Becker, 2018

We document that returns to potential experience among U.S. immigrants are higher for workers coming from rich countries than for those coming from poor countries. We interpret this fact as evidence that workers accumulate less human capital on the job in poor countries, and provide additional evidence consistent with this interpretation. 

Achieving Scale Collectively 

Forthcoming, Econometrica 

Rental market interactions allow small firms to increase their effective scale and mechanize production, even when each individual firm would be too small to invest in expensive machines.

The Human Side of Structural Transformation 

Forthcoming, American Economic Review

We use data on agricultural employment by birth-cohort and a new dataset of education policy reforms to show that the 20th-century human capital increase contributed to structural transformation. Human capital growth accounts for about 20% of the global decline in agricultural employment. 

Working Papers

Cross-Country Differences in the Optimal Allocation of Talent and Technology  

Revise & Resubmit, Econometrica 

I develop a framework to study the joint allocation of talent and technology. The possibility of poor countries to adopt advanced technology from the frontier leads them to a different efficient economic structure - one with larger technology dispersion and concentration of talent. 

Evidence from micro-data supports the theory. The theory reconciles a sizable fraction of cross-country differences in productivity dispersion. 

Self-Employment Within the Firm

We study the role of the internal organization of firms in developing countries in determining their size and productivity as well as the allocation of talent within and between firms. Barriers to within-firm labor specialization are an important driver of the small size and low productivity of manufacturing firms in Uganda. 

Labor Misallocation Across Firms and Regions

Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economic Studies 

We develop a multi-region frictional labor market model to quantify the impact of spatial frictions on the joint allocation of labor across firms and regions. Estimating our model on German data, we find that, despite the large West to East wage gap, the main cost of the spatial frictions is to misallocate labor across firms within regions, rather than across them.

Transforming Institutions: Labor Reallocation and Wage Growth in a Reunified Germany 

How do institutions affect economic performance? We exploit a unique historical episode, the German Reunification, to investigate how this radical change transformed East Germany’s labor market allocation, igniting wage growth in the early years after reunification. 

Searching for Customers, Finding Pollution

In developing countries, most manufacturing firms are small and located in high-density urban areas, often near congested streets. Collecting a firm survey and granular pollution data, we show that firms locate on the busiest roads searching for customer visibility, but in doing so they expose their workers to substantial pollution, with dire health consequences. 

Aggregate Fertility and Households Savings: A General Equilibrium Analysis using Micro Data

We study the relationship between savings and fertility in the context of China. We bring partial equilibrium evidence of a causal negative relationship between the number of children and savings, but we argue that in a simple OLG model general equilibrium forces are likely to attenuate this partial equilibrium effects.