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Our project advances the hypothesis that financial literacy could be one of the factors responsible for the gender gap in wealth, as financial knowledge helps individuals accumulate wealth, but women tend to be less financially literate than men.

Understanding the roots of violent and criminal behaviour is crucial for developing effective prevention and intervention strategies. A large body of research has highlighted the complex interplay between genetic, environmental, and psychological factors in explaining such behaviours. This project will focus the long-term consequences of early exposure to abuse and violence.

We use high‐frequency data on fine particulate matter air pollution (PM 2.5) at the locality level to study the effects of high pollution on daily labor supply decisions in the metropolitan area of Mexico City. We document a negative, non‐linear relationship between PM 2.5 and same‐day labor supply, with strong effects on days with extremely high pollution levels. On these days, the average worker experiences a reduction of around 7.5% of working hours. Workers partially compensate for lost hours by increasing their labor supply on days that follow high‐pollution days. We find that low‐income workers reduce their labor supply significantly less than high‐income workers. Unequal responses to high pollution along other dimensions (job quality, flexibility, gender) matter, but less than income. We provide suggestive evidence that reductions in labor supply due to high pollution are consistent with avoidance behavior.

This project studies the distributional effects of international trade policies and shocks via their impact on consumer prices, which may be different across consumer groups who have different consumption baskets.

The main focus of my research is the question of what makes some schools more effective in helping pupils to make academic progress.

Telehealth connects patients to qualified health care professionals via phone. Although its popularity dramatically increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is limited rigorous evidence of its impact, and no impact of its effect in low-income countries. This project investigates the long-term effects of telehealth on health services and outcomes, as well as the impact across gender, income and age groups.

We measure college graduate quality—the average human capital of a college’s graduates—for graduates from 2,800 colleges in 48 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50% more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences: emigrants from poorer countries are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives both within and across countries.

We propose to study worker and firm views on and willingness to pay for the expansion of job loss insurance in Ethiopia. Job loss insurance consists of payments given to workers after job loss. We propose to interview a representative sample of firms and their workers in the capital city of Addis Ababa, the economic hub of the country.

We measure the contribution of firm-embedded productivity to cross-country income differences. By firm-embedded productivity we refer to firm-specific components of productivity, such as blueprints, management practices, and other intangible capital. Using micro-level data for multinational enterprises (MNEs), we compare market shares of the same MNE in different countries and document that they are systematically larger in less developed countries. This indicates that MNEs face less competition and that firm-embedded productivity is scarce in these countries. We implement a measure of firm-embedded productivity based on this observation. Differences in firm-embedded productivity account for one-third of the cross-country variance in output per worker in our sample.

This project studies the growing importance of high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) in private capital markets. While the role of institutional investors in private markets has already been studied, little attention has been paid to the participation of HNWI in these markets.