Publications
High-speed Broadband and Educational Achievements
Journal of Regional Science
This study sheds new light on the short-run effects of access to high-speed internet on educational disparities. By following three million students belonging to six different cohorts over the period 2012–2022, I estimate the effect of the broadband infrastructure on student performance. While most previous contributions use discontinuous jumps in the available broadband connection speed across space at a given moment in time, this study exploits the gradual rollout of a national infrastructural policy associated with an increase in 30 Mbit/s household broadband coverage from 40% to 80% over a 6-year period. The estimation strategy relies on a unique data set, combining panel data on student performance with a rich set of school- and student-level information and broadband data measured at a very fine spatial scale. Results show an average null effect of high-speed broadband on 8th grade student performance in both literacy and maths. However, these results mask substantial heterogeneity: low performers in grade 5 and students with more advantaged backgrounds benefit from access to high-speed broadband, whereas the opposite is true for other students. Overall, the findings suggest that access to broadband widened performance disparities across students with different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Localized Effects of Confiscated and Re-allocated Real Estate Mafia Assets
joint with Marco di Cataldo and Elisabetta Pietrostefani
Journal of Economic Geography
Asset confiscation regimes are present throughout Europe. The Italian State implements a policy stipulating the confiscation of real estate assets from individuals convicted of mafia-related crimes and the re-allocation of these assets to new uses. The policy of confiscation (confisca) and re-allocation (destinazione) is meant to act as both an anti-mafia measure and a way to compensate local communities by converting real estate assets into public amenities. We evaluate the effects of this programme on local areas by estimating its impact on property values in the proximity of confiscations and re-allocations. The findings reveal a negative effect of confiscations and a positive effect of re-allocations on housing prices, mainly visible in mafia strongholds. Both of these trends can be observed in the time periods that directly follow instances of confiscation and re-allocation and appear to be highly localized. A drop in organized crime activity in the streets where re-allocations have occurred could account for some of the gain in property values caused by re-allocations. These findings have implications for the effectiveness of anti-mafia initiatives aimed at improving the quality of life in areas where criminal activity is more prevalent.
Working Papers
Capital-Skill Complementarity in Firms and in the Aggregate Economy
joint with Giuseppe Berlingieri, Danial Lashkari, and Jonathan Vogel
NBER Working Paper No. 33000 - Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy
We study capital-skill complementarity in a multi-sector framework featuring firm-specific, multi-factor production functions. We characterize the elasticity of the skill premium to the price of capital equipment in terms of firm-level elasticities of substitution across factors, elasticities of substitution across firms and sectors, and factor intensities. Using French administrative data, we first provide reduced-form evidence that equipment-intensive firms are relatively skill-intensive and that exogenous declines in firm-level equipment prices increase firms’ relative demand for skilled labor. We then estimate the micro-level elasticities needed for theory-guided aggregation, providing the first identification of aggregate capital-skill complementarity allowing for arbitrary firm, industry, and aggregate trends in unobserved skill-biased productivity. We find statistically and economically significant aggregate capital-skill complementarity, but this force alone is insufficient to generate the full increase in the relative demand for high-skilled workers observed in the data.
Marshall at the Times of Marshall
joint with Olmo Silva
CEP Discussion Paper No. 2174 - Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Urban Economics
In the late nineteenth century, Alfred Marshall identified three micro-foundations of agglomeration economies: labour pooling (LP), input sharing (IO), and knowledge spillovers (KS). An extensive literature has tested the existence of the three Marshallian forces in modern economies. However, there is limited quantitative evidence on the existence of such forces at the times of Marshall. To shed light on these issues, we exploit novel geo-localised census-level data on entrepreneurs and business proprietors retrieved from six consecutive UK Censuses (1851–1911), coupled with census-level workers’ data, information on historical patents and historical IO tables. We estimate co-agglomeration models to assess the relative importance of LP, IO, and KS in explaining industrial clustering during Britain’s industrialisation. Our results point to a strong role for KS and LP, but only limited evidence for IO. We also show that the strength of the three forces increased over time, and that there is considerable heterogeneity across industries with different characteristics.
Work from Home and Firm Productivity: The Role of ICT and Size
joint with Riccardo Crescenzi and Davide Rigo
CESifo Working Paper No. 12253 - Under Review
This paper investigates the impact of post-pandemic adoption of work from home (WFH) on firm productivity. The paper uses administrative firm-level data covering the universe of remote workers in Italy and leverages exogenous pre-pandemic variation in firm-specific access to fibre broadband as an instrument. We find that WFH had a large negative impact on productivity during the pandemic. However, larger firms and those with prior ICT investments mitigated these losses. In the longer term, the impact of WFH on productivity is no longer significant. Yet, we find suggestive evidence that firms employing highly qualified workers experienced productivity gains.
Natural Disasters, Reshoring Dynamics and Automation
joint with Riccardo Crescenzi
Under Review
This study examines the relationship between reshoring and automation in a context shaped by rising uncertainty and rapid technological advancements. We analyse how idiosyncratic shocks to foreign subsidiaries of multinational business groups prompt a reduction in international activities, driving shifts in the parent firm’s skill composition and domestic investment in automation. Our analysis leverages newly geolocated data covering over 8 million foreign affiliates, firm-level customs data, and a unique matched employer- employee dataset covering the universe of French firms and workers. Our findings reveal that natural disasters affecting foreign affiliates significantly increase parent firms’ propensity to adopt automation technologies and positively affect domestic wages. These effects are concentrated in robot-intensive sectors and among occupations intensive in non-routine tasks, while impacts on other industries are negligible. These results suggest that firms operating in automation-intensive industries react to adverse shocks affecting their foreign affiliates by replacing low-skilled foreign labour with domestic automation.
The New Geography of Remote Workers and Firm Productivity: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data
joint with Davide Rigo
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly reshaped commuting patterns and work dynamics across the globe. Using matched employer-employee data on the whole universe of French workers, we study the effect of post-pandemic changes in workers’ commuting patterns on firm-level outcomes. We find that the average French firm saw an 8% increase in employee commute distances compared to the pre-pandemic period. This shift was primarily driven by incumbent firms hiring individuals who live further away, and was especially notable in occupations with high work-from-home (WFH) potential. In the aftermath of the pandemic, firms with larger increases in commute distances exhibited gains in value-added, productivity and hours worked. Overall, our findings highlight the positive impacts of the pandemic-induced shift towards remote working on firms.
Selected Work in Progress
Aging, Technology and Migration
joint with Daniele Angelini (University of Vienna)
Part of VisitINPS Project