Research
Main publications (and accepted papers)
On the Black-White Gaps in Labor Supply and Earnings over the Lifecycle in the US, with Arnau Valladares-Esteban
Review of Economic Dynamics, vol. 51, p.424-449 December 2023
The Hard Problem of Prediction for Conflict Prevention, with Hannes Mueller
Journal of European Economic Association, vol. 20 (6), p.2440–2467, December 2022
Media coverage: CSIC, La Vanguardia
Parental Beliefs about Returns to Different Types of Investments in School Children, with Orazio Attanasio and Teodora Boneva
Journal of Human Resources, vol. 57, p.1789-1825, November 2022 (lead article)
Media coverage: Evening Standard, HCEO Research Spotlight, TES, Forbes, Phys.org
Parental Beliefs about Returns to Child Health Investments, with Pietro Biroli, Teodora Boneva, and Akash Raja
Journal of Econometrics, vol. 231 (1), p. 33-57, November 2022
Inequality in the Impact of the Coronavirus Shock: Evidence from Real Time Surveys, with Abi Adams-Prassl, Teodora Boneva, and Marta Golin
Journal of Public Economics, vol.189, September 2020
Media coverage: BBC, Washington Post, The Economist, Forbes, The Guardian, ....
Parental Beliefs about Returns to Educational Investments - The Later the Better?, with Teodora Boneva
Journal of European Economic Association, vol. 16 (6), p.1669–1711, December 2018 (lead article)
Media coverage: RES
Reading Between the Lines: Prediction of Political Violence Using Newspaper Text, with Hannes Mueller
American Political Science Review, vol. 112 (2), p. 358-375, May 2018
Media coverage: Barcelona GSE Focus, Voxeu.org
Voting, Education, and the Great Gatsby Curve
Journal of Public Economics, vol. 146, p. 1-14, February 2017 (lead article)
(former title "The Political Economy of Early and College Education - Can Voting Bend the Great Gatsby Curve?")
*LISER Best Paper Prize for young researcher at ECINEQ 2015
Media coverage: The Conversation, Netzpiloten
Other publications (and accepted papers)
The Hidden Toll of the Pandemic: Excess Mortality in non-COVID-19 Hospital Patients, with Thiemo Fetzer and Clara Schreiner
Journal of Health Economics, accepted
The information content of conflict, social unrest and policy uncertainty measures for macroeconomic forecasting, with Marina Diakonova, Luis Molina, Hannes Mueller, Javier J. Pérez
Latin American Journal of Central Banking, 2024
Building Bridges to Peace: A Quantitative Evaluation of Power-Sharing Agreements, with Hannes Mueller
Economic Policy, 2024
Introducing a global dataset on conflict forecasts and news topics, with Hannes Mueller and Ben Seimon
Data & Policy, 2024
Perceived returns to job search, with Abi Adams-Prassl, Teodora Boneva, and Marta Golin
Labour Economics, vol. 80, 2023
The Value of Sick Pay, with Abi Adams-Prassl, Teodora Boneva, and Marta Golin
European Economic Review, vol. 151, 2023
The Imperium of the Colonial Tongue? Evidence on Language Policy Preferences in Zambia, with Rajesh Ramachandran
Journal of African Economies, vol. 32 (1), p.52-80, January 2023
How to measure parenting styles?, with Laëtitia Renée
Review of the Economics of the Household, vol. 21, p.1063-1082, 2023
Using Past Violence and Current News to Predict Changes in Violence, with Hannes Mueller
International Interactions, vol. 48 (4), p.579-596, 2022
Companion paper of our winning entry for the ViEWS conflict prediction competition
The Impact of the Coronavirus Lockdown on Mental Health: Evidence from the US, with Abi Adams-Prassl, Teodora Boneva, and Marta Golin
Economic Policy, vol. 37 (109), p.139–155, January 2022
Can Perceived Returns Explain Enrollment Gaps in Postgraduate Education?, with Teodora Boneva and Marta Golin
Labour Economics, vol. 77, August 2022
Work tasks that can be done from home: Evidence on the variation within and across occupations and industries, with Abi Adams-Prassl, Teodora Boneva, and Marta Golin
Labour Economics, vol.74, January 2022
Furloughing, with Abi Adams-Prassl, Teodora Boneva, and Marta Golin
Fiscal Studies, vol. 41 (3), 591-622, September 2020
What Drives Enrollment Gaps in Further Education? The Role of Beliefs in Sequential Schooling Decisions, with Chris Belfield, Teodora Boneva, and Jonathan Shaw
Economica, vol.87, p.490–529, April 2020
(former title "Money or Fun? Why Students Want to Pursue Further Education")
Discrimination Without Taste - How Discrimination Can Spillover and Persist, with Rajesh Ramachandran
Journal of the Spanish Economic Association (SERIEs), vol. 9 (3), p.249-274, August 2018
Online Appendix
The Big Five personality traits and partisanship in England, with Toke Aidt
Electoral Studies, vol. 54, p.1-21, August 2018 (lead article)
Media coverage: Washington Post Blog, El Diario (Spanish)
Decomposing Gaps between Roma and non-Roma in Romania
Journal of Demographic Economics, vol.84 (2), p.209-229, June 2018
Working Papers
Movies (2024)
with Stelios Michalopoulos
Why are certain movies more successful in some markets than others? Are the entertainment products we consume reflective of our core values and beliefs? These questions drive our investigation into the relationship between a society's oral tradition and the financial success of films. We combine a unique catalog of local tales, myths, and legends around the world with data on international movie screenings and revenues. First, we quantify the similarity between movies' plots and traditional motifs employing machine learning techniques. Comparing the same movie across different markets, we establish that films that resonate more with local folklore systematically accrue higher revenue and are more likely to be screened. Second, we document analogous patterns within the US. Google Trends data reveal a pronounced interest in markets where ancestral narratives align more closely with a movie's theme. Third, we delve into the explicit values transmitted by films, concentrating on the depiction of risk and gender roles. Films that promote risk-taking sell more in entrepreneurial societies today, rooted in traditions where characters pursue dangerous tasks successfully. Films portraying women in stereotypical roles continue to find a robust audience in societies with similar gender stereotypes in their folklore and where women today continue being relegated to subordinate positions. These findings underscore the enduring influence of traditional storytelling on entertainment patterns in the 21st century, highlighting a profound connection between movie consumption and deeply ingrained cultural narratives and values.
Incarceration, Unemployment, and the Racial Marriage Divide (2021)
with Elizabeth Caucutt and Nezih Guner
Revise & resubmit at Restud
Media coverage: Bloomberg, Voxeu.org, BSE Focus
The difference in marriage rates between black and white Americans is striking. Wilson (1987) suggests that a skewed sex ratio and higher rates of incarceration and unemployment are responsible for lower marriage rates among the black population. In this paper, we take a dynamic look at the Wilson Hypothesis. Incarceration rates and labor market prospects of black men make them riskier spouses than white men. We develop an equilibrium search model of marriage, divorce, and labor supply in which transitions between employment, unemployment, and prison differ by race, education, and gender. The model also allows for racial differences in how individuals value marriage and divorce. We estimate the model and investigate how much of the racial divide in marriage is due to the Wilson Hypothesis and how much is due to differences in preferences for marriage. We find that the Wilson Hypothesis accounts for more than three quarters of the model's racial-marriage gap. This suggests policies that improve employment opportunities and/or reduce incarceration for black men could shrink the racial-marriage gap.
How do transfers and universal basic income impact the labor market and inequality? (2022)
with Marcelo R. Santos
Revise & resubmit at AEJ Macro
This paper studies the impact of existing and universal transfer programs on vacancy creation, wages, and welfare using a search-and-matching model with heterogeneous agents and on-the-job human capital accumulation. We calibrate the general equilibrium model to match key moments concerning unemployment, wage and wealth distributions, as well as the distribution of EITC and transfers. In addition, unemployment insurance benefits are related to pre-unemployment earnings and subject to exhaustion, after which agents can only rely on transfers and savings. First, we show that existing transfers hamper economic activity but provide sizeable welfare gains. Next, we show that a universal basic income of nearly $12,500 to each household per year, which replaces all existing transfer programs and unemployment benefits, can lead to small aggregate welfare gains. These welfare gains mostly accrue to less skilled individuals despite their sizable fall in wages, and the overall rise in skill premia and wage inequality. Albeit the extra burden of higher taxes to finance UBI, we show that the increased action in hiring is a key channel though which outcomes for low education groups improve with the reform. However, if we keep the UI benefits in place, the positive effects on job creation vanish and UBI does not improve upon the current system.
City of God: Afterlife Beliefs and Job Support in Brazil (2023)
with Tiago Cavalcanti, Sriya Iyer, Christian Roerig, and Maryam Vaziri
Revise & resubmit at International Economic Review
Using primary data from Brazil, we quantify the link between religion, expectations and economic outcomes, suggesting a key complementarity that for religious networks to provide insurance in this life one also needs strong beliefs in the afterlife. Individuals invest more in their religious communities if they can also expect various forms of com- munity support. The degree of this insurance channel varies across different religions and is highest for Pentecostals. Consistent with this, we build a lifecycle model with heterogeneous agents, imperfect insurance and afterlife beliefs. We discipline model parameters with our data and show that under certain parameterizations the job support channel exists as a by-product of coordinated beliefs in the afterlife. Our results provide evidence that insurance by the community would not be enough to induce religious investments. It is complementarity with beliefs in the afterlife which raises the returns of religious investments above the threshold. The community support and afterlife channel together provide an average value worth 9.6% of consumption in each year.
The Impact of Fear of Automation (2022)
with Marta Golin
Media coverage: Reuters
In this paper, we establish a causal effect of workers' perceived probability of losing one's job due to automation on preferences for redistribution and intentions to join a union. In a representative sample of the US workforce, we elicit the perceived fear of losing one's job to robots or artificial intelligence. We document a strong relationship between fear of automation and intentions to join a union, retrain and switch occupations, preferences for higher taxation, higher government handouts, populist attitudes, and voting intentions. We then show a causal effect of providing information about job loss probabilities on preferred levels of taxation and handouts. In contrast, our information treatment does not affect workers' intentions to self-insure by retraining or switching occupations, but it increases workers' self-reported likelihood of joining a union to seek more job protection. The treatment effects are mostly driven by workers who are informed about larger job loss probabilities than they perceived.
Beliefs about maternal labor supply (2022)
with Teodora Boneva, Marta Golin, and Katja Kaufmann
This paper provides representative evidence on the perceived returns to maternal labor supply. We design a survey to elicit subjective expectations, and show that a mother’s decision to work is perceived to have sizable impacts on child skills, family outcomes, and the future labor market outcomes of the mother. Examining the channels through which the impacts are perceived to operate, we document that beliefs about the impact of additional household income can account for some, but not all, of the perceived positive effects. Beliefs about returns substantially vary across the population and are predictive of labor supply intentions under different policy scenarios related to childcare availability and quality, two factors that are also perceived as important. Consistent with socialization playing a role in the formation of beliefs, we show that respondents whose own mother worked perceive the returns to maternal labor supply as higher.
Pandemic Pressures and Public Health Care: Evidence from England (2022)
with Thiemo Fetzer
Media coverage: Sky News, New Scientist, FAZ, The Economist, La Vanguardia, Sydney Morning Herald, Libertatea
This paper documents that the COVID-19 pandemic induced pressures on the health care system have significant adverse knock-on effects on the accessibility and quality of non-COVID-19 care. We observe persistently worsened performance and longer waiting times in A\&E; drastically limited access to specialist care; notably delayed or inaccessible diagnostic services; acutely undermined access to and quality of cancer care. We find that providers under COVID-19 pressures experience notably more excess deaths among non-COVID related hospital episodes such as, for example, for treatment of heart attacks. We estimate there to be at least one such non-COVID-19 related excess death among patients being admitted to hospital for non-COVID-19 reasons for every 30 COVID-19 deaths that is caused by the disruption to the quality of care due to COVID-19. In total, this amounts to 4,003 non COVID-19 excess deaths from March 2020 to February 2021. Further, there are at least 32,189 missing cancer patients that should counterfactually have started receiving treatment which suggests continued increased numbers of excess deaths in the future due to delayed access to care in the past.
Socio-Economic Gaps in University Enrollment: The Role of Perceived Pecuniary and Non-Pecuniary Returns (2021)
with Teodora Boneva
We elicit students' beliefs about different pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits of university education in a sample of 2,540 secondary school students. Students who would be the first generation in their family to go to university perceive both the pecuniary and the non-pecuniary returns to university education as significantly lower. We train a machine learning algorithm, a random forest, to predict intentions to enroll at university and find that differences in perceived returns across socio-economic groups explain a substantial share of the socio-economic gap. Among the non-pecuniary factors, perceptions about parental approval, beliefs about whether one would enjoy studying, and expected job satisfaction play the most important role. Using a small validation sample, we document that students' ex-ante stated probabilities are highly predictive of ex-post realized applications to university.
The Rise of the "No Party" in England (2021)
with Toke Aidt
We document a remarkable increase over the past two and a half decades in the fraction of people in England feeling close to no party - the rise of the 'no party' - which, today, is close to constituting an absolute majority. We develop a new method to distinguish between age, period, and cohort effects based on individual longitudinal survey data. We find that the rise of the 'no party' is driven much more by a secular trend (period effects) than by cohort effects but that the aggregate cohort effects mask diverging trends between university graduates and those without university education. An investigation of the dynamics of party identification shows that party political disengagement has become more persistent over time.
Measuring Uncertainty at the Regional Level Using Newspaper Text (2019)
In this paper I present a methodology to provide uncertainty measures at the regional level in real time using the full bandwidth of news. In order to do so I download vast amounts of newspaper articles, summarize these into topics using unsupervised machine learning, and then show that the resulting topics foreshadow fluctuations in economic indicators. Given large regional disparities in economic performance and trends within countries, it is particularly important to have regional measures for a policymaker to tailor policy responses. I use a vector-autoregression model for the case of Canada, a large and diverse country, to show that the generated topics are significantly related to movements in economic performance indicators, inflation, and the unemployment rate at the national and provincial level. Evidence is provided that a composite index of the generated diverse topics can serve as a measure of uncertainty. Moreover, I show that some topics are general enough to have homogenous associations across provinces, while others are specific to fluctuations in certain regions.
Human Capital Production and Parental Beliefs
with Teodora Boneva
In this paper we incorporate parental beliefs about returns to parental time investments in the estimation of a human capital production function. We proceed in three steps. First, we collect data on parental beliefs about returns to parental time investments using hypothetical scenarios. We find that beliefs about returns to investments are a significant predictor of parental investments. Second, using the British Cohort Study we estimate a dynamic latent factor model of cognitive and noncognitive skill production and document how these skills map into outcomes over the lifecycle. Third, we combine the estimates from the two previous steps to simulate the effect of a shift in beliefs on investments and future child outcomes. We find that increasing beliefs about the returns to investments for parents with low perceived returns has large payoffs in terms of the future earnings of a child. The gains from increasing beliefs are greatest for children with parents at the bottom of the income distribution.
Work in Progress
Means-Tested Transfers in the US: Facts and Parametric Estimates
with Nezih Guner and Gustavo Ventura
How sizeable are means-tested transfers in the United States? What are the main features of the current redistribution and social insurance system in place? We use micro data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to document the scope of the main means-tested programs in the United States. We report key facts on these programs according to household income, marital status and household composition. We also provide parametric estimates of transfers and probabilities of receipt as a function of income for use in applied work in macroeconomics and public finance.
Policy work
The Peace Dividend of Power Sharing: Quantitative Evidence on the Reduction of Political Violence through Negotiation
with Hannes Mueller
For German Foreign Office
Dynamic Early Warning and Action Model
with Hannes Mueller and Alessandro Ruggieri
For Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office