Job Market Candidates
Mattia Albertini
References: Pieter Bakx, Fabrizio Mazzonna, Raphaël Parchet
Fields of Interest: Labor, Migration, Health, Applied Microeconometrics
My research uses cutting-edge econometric strategies on large panel datasets to answer relevant questions on labor, migration and health to inform the decisions of policymakers.
My job market paper examines how currency shocks, by altering wages relative to neighboring countries, influence return migration and relocation. I argue that these shocks incentivize foreigners to relocate to a neighboring country, while they maintain employment abroad to capitalize on the real wage differential, effectively becoming cross-border workers. The relocation creates demand shocks that lead to both increases and decreases in housing prices on either side of the border. My findings display significant distinctions in migration patterns between border economies and those of long-term migrants across countries. Additionally, this research sheds light on the implications of relocation for local housing markets, illustrating how relocation incentives can exacerbate affordability challenges for local residents.
Giuseppe Di Giacomo
References: Laura Bottazzi, Lorenz Kueng, Giovanni Pica
Fields of Interest: Applied Microeconomics, Labor Economics, Automation, Tourism
I am an applied microeconomist specializing in labor economics, focusing on how labor market shocks, such as automation and tourism, influence labor market dynamics and human capital.
My job market paper examines how short-term exogenous increases in tourist arrivals, triggered by terrorist attacks abroad, affect college education in Italy. I find that individuals respond to these shocks by reducing college enrollment and completion. This decline is similar across genders but only temporary for men and is primarily driven by decreased enrollment in Social Sciences and Humanities. The paper is the first to highlight a channel through which tourism can stimulate the economy in the short term while having adverse long-run effects.
Mohammadali Mokhtari
References: Lorenz Kueng, Fabrizio Mazzonna, Giovanni Pica
Fields of Interest: Applied Microeconomics, Development Economics, Health Economics
I am an applied microeconomist with expertise in causal econometrics, focusing on development, health, and their intersections.
In my job market paper ``Efficient Redistribution: A Quasi-Experimental Approach to UB'', I leverage Iran's large-scale 2010 subsidy reform, which provided a universal cash transfer of $710 per person per year, to explore key questions in the Universal Basic Income (UBI) literature. My empirical findings address two common criticisms of UBI in a context where most recipients are not poor: (1) large income transfers could reduce labor supply, especially among lower-income individuals, and (2) increased consumption of temptation goods. My findings indicate that cash transfers significantly increased social welfare, particularly among low-income households.
Felix Schönenberger
References: Patricia Funk, Vincent Pons, Noam Yuchtman
Fields of Interest: Political Economy, Applied Microeconometrics, Public Economics
My research uses quasi-experimental methods to study how voters form beliefs and participate in the electoral process, how voter preferences are aggregated by electoral competition, how electoral institutions ensure the accountability of elected politicians, and how democratic processes shape public policy and economic outcomes.
My job market paper introduces a novel identification strategy exploiting lame-duck sessions in the U.S. Congress to isolate electoral incentives from selection effects, showing that reelection concerns induce legislators to strategically moderate their positions. I estimate electoral incentive effects large enough to reduce polarization by 25% and to flip high-stakes legislative outcomes under plausible counterfactual scenarios motivated by ongoing debates on U.S. constitutional design.
Nicole Venus
References: Patricia Funk, Nagore Iriberri, Lorenz Kueng
Fields of Interest: Labor and Demographic Economics (primary); Gender Economics, Household Economics, Economics of Science (secondary)
As an applied economist, my research centers around gender equality within the fields of Economics of Science, Labor and Household Economics. My work combines elements from the standard economists' toolkit such as econometric methods and quantitative modelling with less conventional tools like web-scraping for data collection or basic machine learning methods for text analysis.
In my job market paper, I examine the gender gap in the representation of economists on Wikipedia, showing that while women were underrepresented conditional on notability, this gap has been closed in recent years. To demonstrate the relevance of underrepresentation of female scholars, I provide causal evidence that having a Wikipedia page increases researchers' mentions in the news leveraging the staggered introduction of a new content translation tool across language editions.