This paper estimates the impact of college teaching on students’ academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from Bocconi University (Italy) matched with Italian tax records. The estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed sequence of compulsory courses. We find that good teaching matters more for the labor market than for academic performance. Moreover, the professors who are best at improving the academic achievement of their best students are also the ones who boost their earnings the most. On the contrary, for low ability students the academic and labor market returns of teachers are largely uncorrelated. We also find that professors who are good at teaching high ability students are often not the best teachers for the least able ones. These findings can be rationalized in a model where teaching is a multi-dimensional activity with each dimension having differential returns on the students’ academic outcomes and labor market success.
We analyze segregation between immigrants and natives at the firm level and explore the connection between segregation and wage inequality in Switzerland.
In his presidential address, Zingales (2015) observes that large parts of society perceive finance as a rent-seeking activity and that complex financial regulation is prone to arbitrage and capture. In my dissertation, I investigate whether there is some truth in these allegations. In Chapter 1, I estimate the extent of regulatory arbitrage by banks in the securitization market. In Chapters 2 and 3, I show how incentive structures in credit rating agencies and banks can explain credit rating bias and excessive risk-taking, respectively. My findings have important implications for the design of financial regulation.
This thesis explores the impact that two types of non-conventional barriers - non-tariff measures (NTMs) and cultural traits - have on trade. The first essay deals with the asymmetric impact that NTMs can have on trading partners and provides estimates of the bilateral effects of NTMs (in terms of ad valorem equivalents) across exporter-importer pairs. The second essay finds support that, at the global level, the negative impact of NTMs on trade is greater with respect to final goods (“NTM escalation”), but that there is a degree of NTM de-escalation as one moves from primary goods to intermediate goods. The third essay investigates what role, if any, that the cultural traits of trust propensity and agreeableness might have on international trade and shows that their impact is limited when considered in isolation, but that trust propensity has a strong and positive effect on trade when it is interacted with distance.
The recent events since the onset of the subprime crisis in 2007 have put forward the central role of the financial market in developed economies and its close linkages with other markets, such as the sovereign one. The extreme (co)variations in the financial market are difficult to explain by the value of the fundamentals, and factors like investor sentiment, liquidity and simultaneous comovement are privileged. This thesis contributes in better understanding the role of these factors in explaining highly debated topics of international financial markets such as (i) the predictability of their returns, (ii) the commonality in liquidity, and (iii) several overlooked aspects in the modeling of market comovement.
This dissertation focuses on the measurement of regional home care policy and its effects on health care utilization. It brings three main contributions. First, it provides causal evidence on the effects of home care policy generosity on hospitalizations, doctor visits, and nursing home use. Variations in generosity across the Swiss cantons and over time are used to identify the effects of canton home care policy. The endogeneity of that policy is addressed by using instrumental variables. Second, comprehensive measures of regional home care policy are developed. Two dimensions of generosity are measured as latent variables using factor analysis: the Participation and Intensity dimensions (i.e. how many persons have access to home care services and how much care is provided to home care users). Third, it proposes a bias correction to the OLS estimator for linear regression with factor scores (i.e. estimated values of latent variables such as home care policy).
Why do people live where they live and what are the consequences of these decisions? People and firms allocate themselves unevenly across space. In spite of large costs incurred when living in metropolitan areas, economic agents remain extremely concentrated in a finite number of cities. This thesis explores several factors that may influence these location decisions and their effect on economic agents. The first essay questions the role of cultural amenities in explaining the location of firms and residents across American cities. Next, the second essay examines a consequence of the geographic concentration of workers. It evaluates the influence of urban density on the quality of the match between workers' education and their occupation. Finally, the last essay documents the importance of housing vacancies in France. It examines how distance and access to the city center affect the housing vacancy rate in suburban municipalities.
