Welcome
I’m a PhD candidate in Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain.
I work on questions in Labor, Public and Urban Economics.
My research examines how local economic conditions influence the optimal design of labor market policies and workers’ employment trajectories.
I am on the 2025/2026 job market.
Job Market Paper
Selected for the 2026 EALE Tour | Winner of the 2024
BeNA Innovative Research Award
Abstract
: This paper studies how local economic conditions shape the optimal design of unemployment benefits across space. 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, (ii) behavioral responses in unemployment duration and (iii) distortions to location choice. I estimate the fiscal costs of the unemployment duration and migration 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, higher benefits in expensive regions attract jobseekers, raising fiscal costs. My findings imply that indexing unemployment benefits to local prices makes benefits excessively generous in high-price locations, and that redistribution towards regions with lower prices yields sizable welfare gains.
Working Papers
(with
Albrecht Glitz
, Joan Monras)
Abstract
: We document substantial rent gaps between "market" rents and households' actual rent. Households who have been in the same housing unit for 15 years pay about 30 percent less than households who rent an observationally equivalent unit in the same location for the first time. This rent gap is larger in high growth cities. We decompose the total rental gap into a regulatory gap—the gap that is due to legal restrictions on within-tenure rent growth—and a residual gap. We show that the regulatory gap accounts for only slightly more than 50 percent of the actual gap. This suggests that frictions other than existing regulation likely give incumbents' an advantage in the rental market, something that, we argue, is inconsistent with landlord market power. We embed these features in an overlapping generations model, which we estimate using German data, to study how frictions in the rental market limit labor mobility, and how much this, in turn, explains why housing affordability is a problem in high growth cities.
Work in Progress
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
-
Labor Economics for undergraduate students (2023-2024)
-
Public Economics for undergraduate students (2022)
-
Modern Statistical Computing for undergraduate students (2023)
Theme: Minimal by orderedlist
