Working papers
"Does Risk Shape Economies? Income Volatility and Structural Change", with Fenicia Cossu (University of Cagliari) and Alessio Moro (University of Cagliari).
August 2026 CEPR DP20594 - Supplement appendix
Countries at similar levels of income can differ markedly in their sectoral composition. We show that income risk can account for part of these differences. In a multi-sector model with non-homothetic preferences, higher sectoral TFP volatility reduces the services share at a given level of GDP through a precautionary saving mechanism. Using U.S. time-series and household-level data, we find a negative and statistically significant relationship between several proxies for income risk and the services share. This relationship also holds for Latin American and Asian premature deindustrializers. We then build and calibrate a dynamic stochastic growth model of structural transformation and run a counterfactual in which we set early U.S. aggregate volatility to Great Moderation low levels. The counterfactual economy can explain about 17% of the services-share gap between the U.S. in 1879 and premature deindustrializers at comparable income levels.
"Unemployment benefits in continuous time heterogeneous agents models", Master degree dissertation.
December 2023
Unemployment insurance changes not only whether people work, but how they consume and accumulate wealth. I study how a fixed unemployment benefit reshapes individual behavior and the wealth distribution in a continuous-time general equilibrium model with incomplete markets and idiosyncratic labor income risk. Building on the Aiyagari–Bewley–Huggett "workhorse model" of Achdou, Han, et al. (2022) and its endogenous-labor extension in Moll (2020), I let agents choose at any instant whether to work and how to split income between consumption and saving. The benefit lets them draw an income without bearing the disutility of labor, which turns the participation margin into a sequence of optimal-stopping problems and yields four states of nature rather than two. The economy is characterized by a coupled system of Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman and Kolmogorov-Forward PDEs, solved with a finite-difference mean-field-games algorithm. Introducing the benefit lowers consumption at a given utility and pushes low-productivity types toward the borrowing constraint, thickening the Dirac point mass there.
Work in progress
“Financial Economics”, book co-author with Vincenzo Merella (University of Economics Prague), Paolo Mattana (University of Cagliari) and Francesco Medda (University of Cagliari).
January 2025