Countries where my research has been presented, as of 19/10/2025, and a tribute to "The World Turned Upside Down"
PhD Candidate in Economics at The London School of Economics and Political Science
with Pietro Garibaldi
IZA DP No. 17392, CEPR DP19652
The secular decline in the labor share and the long run reduction in labor supply suggest that imperfect labor markets can play a role in long run economic growth. This paper introduces monopsony in a Neoclassical Growth Model with monopolistic superstar firms. The endogenous markdown of productivity on wages is the key driver of growth misallocation in the asymptotic balanced growth path. Labor market imperfections in superstar firms induce “growth” effects on the labor share and hours worked, even when preferences imply that income and substitution effects of wage changes cancel each other out. The consumption equivalent loss with respect to the optimal growth path is calibrated between 15 and 20 percent, depending on the assumed set of preferences. The theory is not only coherent with the dynamics of the labor share and hours worked in advanced economies, but also with time varying markdown in the US estimated from a simple accounting exercise.
Timeline
with Thomas Drechsel, Michael McLeay and Silvana Tenreyro
Is the inflation targeting framework suitable for an environment with commodity price swings? Are there circumstances in which a fixed exchange rate could be beneficial? We study these perennial questions from the perspective of economies that have different exposures to commodity trade. We develop a flexible but tractable model for an economy that imports and/or exports commodities; moreover, in line with empirical evidence, we allow international borrowing conditions to vary endogenously with the commodity cycle, which gives rise to additional costs and benefits of active exchange rate management. By varying the economy’s commodity exposure along these dimensions, we analyze the implied volatility of inflation and activity under different policy rules, and derive the optimal policy. We find that the desirability of different policy configurations critically depends on the economy’s specific commodity exposure. Nonetheless, some form of inflation targeting tends to perform well in a relatively wide range of macroeconomic environments. Active exchange rate management is particularly costly in response to fundamentals-driven movements, with countervailing benefits when volatility is driven by financial factors.
Timeline