Publications (in reverse chronological order)

The Effects of Fiscal Decentralization on Publicly Provided Services and Labor Markets (with Michela Giorcelli and Enrica Maria Martino)
Economic Journal, conditionally accepted
Link
This paper studies how fiscal decentralization affects labor supply. It explores a 1993 reform that increased the fiscal autonomy of Italian municipalities by replacing government transfers with revenues from a local property tax. Our identification leverages cross-municipal variation in the degree of decentralization that stems from differences in the average age of buildings caused by bombings during WWII. Decentralization expanded municipal services, such as nursery schools. These effects are larger in areas with greater political competition. The paper then investigates how the reform affected labor markets. Decentralization increased female labor supply—probably through expanded availability of nursery schools—thereby reducing the gender gap in employment.
Coverage: Gender Budget Report 2019 (MEF-RGS) presented at the Italian Parliament; Kellogg Insight.
The Effects of Computer-Assisted Learning on Students' Long-Term Development (with Yi Lu and Hong Song)
​Journal of Development Economics, forthcoming
Link
In this paper, we examine the effect of computer-assisted learning on students’ long-term development. We explore the implementation of the “largest ed-tech intervention in the world to date,” which connected China’s best teachers to more than 100 million rural students through satellite internet. We find evidence that exposure to the program improved students’ academic achievement, labor performance, and computer usage. We observe these effects up to ten years after program implementation. These findings indicate that education technology can have long-lasting positive effects on a variety of outcomes and can be effective in reducing the rural–urban education gap.
Coverage: Diario Financiero, Mint, Kellogg Insight, Business Insider.
Career Spillovers in Internal Labor Markets  (with Giulia Bovini, Jin Li, Matteo Paradisi, and Michael Powell)
Review of Economic Studies​, forthcoming
Link
This paper studies career spillovers across workers, which arise in firms with limited promotion opportunities. We exploit a 2011 Italian pension reform that unexpectedly tightened eligibility criteria for the public pension, leading to sudden, substantial, and heterogeneous retirement delays. We use administrative data on Italian private-sector workers and leverage cross-firm variation to isolate the effect of retirement delays among soon-to-retire workers on the wage growth and promotions of their colleagues. We find evidence of spillover patterns consistent with older workers blocking the careers of their younger colleagues. These effects are present only in firms with limited promotion opportunities.
Coverage: Kellogg Insight, Business Insider, The Weeds, New York Times.
Reconstruction Aid, Public Infrastructure, and Economic Development: The Case of the Marshall Plan in Italy (with Michela Giorcelli)
Journal of Economic History, forthcoming in 2023
Link
The Marshall Plan (1948–1952) was the largest aid transfer in history. This paper estimates its effects on Italy's postwar local economic development. It exploits plausibly exogenous differences between Italian provinces in the value of reconstruction grants they received. Provinces that could modernize a larger portion of their infrastructure stock experienced higher increases in agricultural production, especially for perishable crops that benefited the most from an efficient transportation system. In the same provinces, we observe larger investments in labor-saving machines, the entry of more firms into the industrial sector, and a larger expansion of the industrial and service workforce.
Coverage: UCLA Research, WeTheItalians.com.
The Dynamics and Spillovers of Management Interventions: Evidence from the Training Within Industry Program (with Michela Giorcelli)
​Journal of Political Economy, 130 (6): 1630-1675, 2022
Working paper, Published version
This paper examines the long-term and spillover effects of management interventions on firm performance. Under the Training Within Industry (TWI) program, the U.S. government provided management training to firms involved in war production between 1940 and 1945. Using a newly collected panel dataset on all 11,575 U.S. firms that applied to the program, we find that the TWI training had positive and long-lasting effects on firm performance and the adoption of beneficial managerial practices. Moreover, it generated complementarities among different types of training and had positive spillover effects on the supply chain of trained firms.
Coverage: Kellogg Insight, Podcast.
The Indirect Effects of Educational Expansions: Evidence from a Large Enrollment Increase in University Majors
Journal of Labor Economics, 38 (3): 767-804, 2020
Working paper, Published version
Increasing access to education may have consequences that go beyond the effects on marginal students encouraged to enroll. It may change peer effects, school quality, and returns to skill. This paper studies how classmates and teaching inputs affect learning of university students, exploiting an educational expansion in Italian STEM majors. Newly-collected data on 27,236 students indicate that less-prepared classmates and congestion of teaching resources lowered learning of incumbent students in STEM fields. Their learning, however, increased in courses in which the new classmates raised average preparedness. These effects might have had long-lasting consequences on the returns to STEM degrees.
This is a newer version of my job market paper "The General Equilibrium Effects of Educational Expansion". 
Coverage: Kellogg Insight, Marginal Revolution, IPR News, VoxEu, Washington Post, Science Careers. 
Scientific Education and Innovation: From Technical Diplomas to University STEM Degrees. (with Michela Giorcelli)
Journal of the European Economic Association​, 18 (5): 2608–2646, 2020
Working paper, Published version
This paper uses a change in enrollment requirements in Italian STEM majors to study the effects of university STEM education on innovation and labor market outcomes. University-level scientific education had two direct effects on patenting of students who acquired a STEM degree thanks to the policy. First, it changed the direction of their innovation. Second, it moved these individuals closer to the innovation processes by allowing them to reach top positions within firms' hierarchies. STEM degrees, however, also changed occupational sorting. Some higher-achieving individuals used STEM degrees to enter jobs that required university-level education, but did not focus on patenting.
Coverage: Kellogg Insight, BYU Radio.
Compulsory Licensing and Innovation. Historical Evidence From German Patents After WWI. (with Petra Moser and Joerg Baten)
Journal of Development Economics, 126: 231-242, 2017
Working paper, Published version
Compulsory licensing allows governments to license patented inventions without the consent of patent owners. Intended to mitigate the potential welfare losses from enforcing foreign-owned patents, many developing countries use this policy to improve access to drugs that are covered by foreign-owned patents. The effects of compulsory licensing on access to new drugs, however, are theoretically ambiguous: Compulsory licensing may encourage innovation by increasing competition or discourage innovation by reducing expected returns to R&D. Empirical evidence is rare, primarily because contemporary settings offer little exogenous variation in compulsory licensing. We address this empirical challenge by exploiting an event of compulsory licensing as a result of World War I when the US Trading with the Enemy Act made all German-owned patents available for licensing to US firms. Firm-level data on German patents indicate that compulsory licensing was associated with a 30 percent increase in invention by German firms whose inventions were licensed.
Coverage: Kellogg Insight, QSB Insight. 

Working Papers

Countries for Old Men: An Analysis of the Age Wage Gap (with Matteo Paradisi)
Link
In the last three decades, the wages of older workers in many high-income countries have grown at a much faster rate than the wages of younger workers. This paper uses extensive data from multiple countries to provide an analysis of this age wage gap. First, the widening of the age wage gap stems from the increasing difficulty of reaching high-paying jobs experienced by younger workers. Second, a large share of the slowdown in the careers of younger workers occurred within firms. Third, differences in the appropriation of firm rents have been more important than worker characteristics in widening the age wage gap. The last portion of the analysis shows that the effects are larger for firms with greater constraints on adding higher-ranked jobs to their organization, which highlights the role of career spillovers in widening the age wage gap.
Coverage: 2022 "Ezio Tarantelli" Award from the Italian Association of Labor Economics.

Work in Progress

Gender Convergence in the Labor Market: Are Women Climbing or Men Falling? (with Jaime Arellano-Bover, Salvatore Lattanzio, and Matteo Paradisi)
Corporate Hierarchies in the 21st Century (with Jiarui Cao, Benjamin Friedrich, and Kieu-Trang Nguyen)

Other Publications

Fiscal decentralisation can improve women's labour outcomes (with Michela Giorcelli and Enrica Maria Martino)
​VoxEU, February 2022
Reducing rural-urban education gap through computer-assisted learning: Evidence from China (with Yi Lu and Hong Song)
​VoxEU, March 2021 (Also published by VoxChina and VoxDev)
What Happens to Younger Workers When Older Workers Don’t Retire? (with Jin Li and Michael Powell)
​Harvard Business Review, November 2018
Access to Higher Education and the Value of a University Degree
​VoxEU CEPR, December 2014