In the picture: view from a bike ride via South Street Bridge, Philadelphia.
Research field and interests: Applied Microeconomics; Housing and Labor Economics; Urban Economics and Inequality.
Working Papers
Abstract: I study how changes in the composition of the local residents due to structural technological changes have shaped the cross-section of housing prices within cities in Germany during the period 2007-2019. To do so I combine a large listing dataset containing information on housings at the 1-km2 grid level with administrative data for the labor market. I first show that the price of housings at different market segments evolved heterogeneously both between and within cities, and that housings at the bottom-end segment have gained more value in large agglomerations than in the rest of the country, making the local market there more homogeneous. By relying on a shift-share approach, I quantify the effect of the variation in the share of abstract jobs on housing prices at different segments of the market. I show that this effect is heterogeneous across sub-markets. Prices at the bottom-end segment in cities highly exposed to abstract jobs were growing on average 36.29% more compared to the prices of the bottom-end segment in cities with low or negative growth in abstract jobs. Finally, I study the implications of these heterogeneous price gains in response to labor market changes for the local workers in terms of housing affordability.
[Full Paper]
Abstract: The price-to-rent ratio is a simple tool used to evaluate whether it is more convenient to rent or to buy in a certain location at a specific point in time. In this paper I build location- and type-specific hedonic price and rent indexes to study the time evolution of prices and rents of similar types of buildings in the housing market and to understand the price-to-rent dynamic. I find that most of the increase in the housing prices is driven by specific types of housing stocks, small and new apartments, which are growing at a much faster rate than others. I further show that while quality matters in explaining rental and price variation of new flats, the variation in prices of small flats is almost completely driven by changes in the location premia. I find that population growth largely affect these premia, also after accounting for endogeneity. Prices are more elastic than rents to changes in the local socio-economic conditions.
Abstract: We combine a large administrative panel dataset for the German labor market with patent data from PatStat to study the causal effects of innovation on labor market outcomes at the local-sectoral level from 2004 to 2019. We do so by building an instrument for local-sectoral trends in innovation that exploits the network of patent citations. According to our estimates, in innovative sectors, growth of average wage and in lower quartiles accelerated, while top-quartile wages growth was slower. This is reflected by a consolidation of routine and manual workers' wages in more innovative sectors. We hence investigate how labor market institutions, namely Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA), affect innovation returns on wages at the micro-level. By exploiting the regional variation of innovation within the same industry, we find that routines and manuals affected by bargained wage rises also benefit from innovation returns, while abstracts in the same industries are not responsive to innovation through the channel of collective bargaining.
[Draft available here]
Work in progress
Energy shocks, job-to-job flows, and the skill premium (with C. Berson and A. Consolo)
Labor reforms and housing policies: the macro and micro of the urban disparities (with G. Cerruti and A. Sardo)
Publications
Policy Reports
Assesing large-scale restructuring events across EU Member States between 2003-2023 (with E. Franzetti and A. Marques-Santos), European Commission's Joint Research Centre policy brief, 2025.
Berlin real estate market developments one year after the rent cap (with M. Dolls, C. Fuest, D. Gstrein, C. Krolage, F. Neumeier), Ifo Institute policy note, 2022. Available only in German.
Pre-doctoral
Should she stay or should she go? (with N.F. Saporito), published by Femeris, Revista Multidisciplinar de Estudios de Género, Vol. 3, N. 1, 2018.
Others (in Italian)
L’indice di povertà in Italia: una mappa del post-covid, Il Mulino, 2021.
Gli effetti del SARS-CoV-2 sulle disuguaglianze in Italia: dove eravamo, dove saremo (with R. Sciarra), CEST Volume published by Editoriale Scientifica, 2020.
Contributor. Quaderni di Biblioteca della Libertà by Einaudi Centre, 2019.
Contributor. La mafia come impresa. Analisi del sistema economico criminale e delle politiche di contrasto, edited by Franco Angeli, 2017.