“Paper Title”

Coming soon!

Presentations: CREi International Lunch Workshop (UPF, Barcelona); UEA Summer School 2026 (LSE, London); 8th QMUL Economics and Finance Workshop; Doctoral training in Structural Change, Growth, and Economic Development (Poster); 2nd CREST Urban Workshop*

Gender Skill Gaps and Gender Inequality Along the Wage Distribution

with Michele Battisti, Alexandra Fedorets, and Lavinia Kinne

Revise and Resubmit, Labour Economics

Gender differences in labor market outcomes tend to be especially pronounced among top earners. Using the international PIAAC dataset, this paper shows that such ‘glass ceilings’ can also be observed for numeracy skills, i.e. competencies with large labor market returns. Women at the top of the wage distribution have both lower numeracy scores and lower returns to higher levels of numeracy compared to men, suggesting that numeracy skills may play an important role in our understanding of well-known gender gaps in labor market outcomes. These numeracy-wage patterns are especially pronounced for parents and for those with their highest degree in a non-STEM field of study, which speaks in favor of the importance of these life decisions for skill evolution. Our paper argues that – despite the increasing educational equality – there exist inequalities in skills among adult men and women, and these may impede the convergence of the gender wage gap.

Good Money in Bad Times: Indirect Issuance of Banknotes in China, 1905–1936

with Xin Dong, Debin Ma, Nuno Palma, and Meng Wu

China pioneered paper money in the thirteenth century, yet by the early twentieth century it still lacked a unified national banknote. From 1905 to 1936, the money supply expanded fivefold despite war, political fragmentation, and the absence of an effective central bank. We highlight a neglected mechanism: indirect banknote issuance (lingquan), whereby non issuing banks deposited reserves with authorized issuers to obtain notes for local circulation. Using newly digitized banking yearbooks and archival evidence, we show that lingquan accounted for 12–40% of annual issuance and functioned through a division of labor between major issuing banks and locally embedded native banks.

Work in Progress Title

with Coauthor Name

Macroeconomic Implications of the Energy Crisis: Evidence from HANK

What are the macroeconomic effects of an energy shortage? Building on Pieroni (2023), I develop a two-sector heterogeneous-agent New Keynesian (HANK) model with an energy sector and a non-energy sector. Energy firms use labor to produce energy, which serves both as a household consumption good and as an input for intermediate-goods firms. Because households require a minimum level of energy to subsist, I combine energy and non-energy goods using the Stone–Geary aggregator. Since energy supply is endogenous, I simulate the crisis as a negative technology shock to energy firms. The shock has a negligible effect on production but a large and uneven effect on consumption: aggregate demand falls, inequality rises, and low-income households bear a disproportionate share of the burden. Decomposing the consumption response, I find that the shock operates mainly through the energy-price and labor-market channels. Targeted transfers can mitigate these adverse effects.

Land Misallocation, Local Governments, and Spatial Development: A Quantitative Analysis of China

MRes Dissertation

In China, governments shape regional development through land regulation. To study the regional and aggregate consequences of these regulations, both across and within cities, I develop a quantitative spatial model in which local governments own land and spend land revenues on local infrastructure. I invert the model using data on 278 prefectures in 2010 and run two sets of counterfactuals: expanding land quotas in selected cities, and changing the share of residential land within a city. Allocating additional land to megacities is more efficient in terms of both welfare and output, whereas expanding quotas in medium-sized cities reduces aggregate output. Holding total land supply fixed, both welfare and output are inverted-U-shaped in the residential land share; for output, labor mobility and infrastructure are the key channels. The current allocation of residential land is suboptimal for both welfare and output. These findings point to a misallocation of land between residential and industrial uses: raising the share of land designated for residential use could substantially increase welfare and output, both locally and in the aggregate.