Welcome
I’m a PhD candidate in Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain.
My research examines how public policies shape household decisions and labor market outcomes across space.
I am on the 2025/2026 academic job market.
Job Market Paper
Cities with Benefits
Draft available soon
Abstract
: This paper studies how local economic conditions shape the trade-off between insurance and fiscal costs in the design of unemployment benefits. I develop a theoretical framework that characterizes the insurance value and fiscal costs of unemployment benefits across locations as a function of (i) local prices and behavioral responses in (ii) unemployment duration and (iii) location choice. I estimate the fiscal costs of the two behavioral responses using novel quasi-experimental variation from Germany's Hartz IV reform, which tied benefit levels to local rents for long-term unemployed individuals. Unemployment durations respond similarly to benefit changes in high- and low-price locations. However, high-benefit regions attract jobseekers, causing fiscal burden. Through the lens of the model, the fiscal costs from migration are large enough to offset the greater insurance value of benefits in high-price locations.
Work in Progress
The Incumbents' Cost of Living Advantage
(with
Albrecht Glitz
, Joan Monras)
Draft available soon
Abstract
: Households become less geographically mobile as they accumulate tenure in a location. In this paper, we quantify how much renting households can save on their cost of living by not moving and estimate its effect on the spatial distribution of households and housing supply. By matching market housing units to a panel of renting households in Germany, we estimate that incumbent households pay rents that are 31% below the matched market level, and that this rent gap is particularly large in locations with rapid market rent growth (48%). While tenant rent control can explain around half of this gap, we show that landlords adjust rents infrequently and do not set rents at their legal maximum, which is especially prevalent among non-professional owners. Finally, we embed this rent gap in an overlapping-generations spatial equilibrium model to quantify its role for the spatial allocation of households and variation in housing supply across locations.
Stepping Stones or Dead Ends? How Geography Shapes the Effects of Low-Skill Employment
(with
Nathan Jones)
Abstract
: Starting a career in low-skill employment has been associated with persistently worse labor market outcomes. Yet, such jobs are often concentrated in urban areas, which tend to offer substantial long-run advantages for workers. This paper examines whether the long-run effects of starting a career in low-skill employment differ across locations. We study the case of Spain’s tourism sector—a major employer of young workers that spans both urban and rural areas—to explore how geography shapes the career consequences of low-skill work. Using newly digitized data on tourist flows over forty years, we exploit variation in exposure to tourist demand across regions and graduation cohorts to measure the long-run effects of graduating in a tourist boom. Ten years after graduation, we find that workers exposed to tourist demand (i) are more likely to work in touristic sectors; (ii) have lower earnings; and (iii) are less likely to have attained higher education. Crucially, we also find that local tourism booms attract young workers through migration. Going forward, we will study whether the long-run effects of early-career employment in a low-skilled sector such as tourism differ across local labor markets.
Teaching
UPF
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Labor Economics (Undergraduate) (2023-2024)
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Public Economics (Undergraduate) (2022)
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Modern Statistical Computing (Undergraduate) (2023)
Theme: Minimal by orderedlist
