Hello!

I am a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University.

My research interests are mainly in firm dynamics, financial economics, and macroeconomics.

I am affiliated with the NBER.

At Stern, I am also the academic director of the B.S. in Business and Political Economy.

I hail from Rimini, Italy, I live in Brooklyn, and I am a Toro fan.

Current projects

The Dynamics of Firm-level Pay: Theory and Evidence from Portugal - with Rui Castro

We document that Portugal's earnings inequality has been steeply decreasing since the mid-1990s, mostly due to a compression in firm pay. We investigate the determinants of this evolution, by deploying a tractable model of firm-pay heterogeneity featuring labor market's monopsonistic power in a Hopenhayn-style firm dynamics framework. Our analysis suggests that a substantial increase in minimum wage was responsible for the wages of low-productivity firms to rise with respect to the mean.

Internal Migration in Italy: New Evidence from Administrative Data, - with Daniele Coen-Pirani

We characterize internal migration among Italian regions between 1974 and 2020 using administrative data on private-sector employees. A few stylized facts emerge: (i) Inter-regional migration rates in Italy have been rising steadily in the last few decades; (ii) gross worker flows are significantly larger than absolute net flows between regions; (iii) internal migrants tend to be younger and have lower yearly earnings prior to migration. (iv) The dynamics of migrant earnings is characterized by a decline in (nominal) yearly earnings prior to migration and a subsequent increase larger than the prior decline; (v) the dynamics of yearly earnings of migrants is dominated by variation in weeks worked, while weekly wages play a minor role. We interpret these facts using a dynamic spatial model that embeds key institutional features of the Italian labor market: centralized wage bargaining, strong employment protection for older workers, and temporary employment contracts for younger ones.