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. 

Measuring Valuation of Liquidity with Penalized Withdrawals  

We propose using penalized withdrawals from retirement savings accounts, identified from U.S. tax records, as a revealed-preference tool to characterize households’ valuation of liquidity. We find pervasive evidence of high valuation of liquidity, hence that shocks are imperfectly insured, especially so in financially underdeveloped areas and among black communities which are plausibly marginalized from the credit market.

Press: Bloomberg 

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.