Research & Policy



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

Labor Market Shocks across Heterogeneous Housing Markets (JMP) 

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] 

Heterogeneous housing returns in segmented markets

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.

[Full Paper]

Localised innovation and its effects in the labor markets (with G. Lo Conte)

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-sector level from 2005 to 2019. We do so by building an instrument for localised and sector-specific trends in innovation that exploits the network of patent citations. According to our estimates, more innovative sectors become more concentrated over time, positively affecting the wage distribution. Employment increases, and so does the share of skilled workers. These effects do not spillover outside of the innovative sectors. All in all, our results show that innovation is beneficial in terms of growth and diffusion of skills but it could potentially harm competition by wiping out smaller and less-innovative firms in the sector. We further investigate the mechanisms at the micro-level to understand which groups of workers and firms benefit from the increase in employment. Despite the positive effect on the overall distribution, we find that not all workers enjoy returns from innovation the same way, in line with previous results from the skill-biased technological change’s theory.

(Working paper available soon)

Work in progress

Publications