We study how foreign language proficiency affects brain drain by exploiting the heterogeneous exposure of Albania to Italian television in the second half of the twentieth century. We document that, due to geographical proximity, the Italian TV signal accidentally reached Albania and, conditional on geographic conditions, Albanians' exposure to the signal was as good as random. We find that exposure to Italian TV led to a considerable increase in Italian proficiency rates and strongly increased the probability of migrating of highly skilled individuals while not affecting other skill groups. We rule out other channels through which TV might affect migration and interpret our findings as the effect of foreign language proficiency on brain drain.

Presented at:  The 1st International Conference of the Georgian Economic Association (Tbilisi 2024), DEF LUISS Internal Seminar (Rome 2023), The Junior Workshop on the Economics of Migration (Paris 2023), EUI Migration Working Group (Florence, 2022),  IFO CEMIR Junior Economist Workshop  (Munich 2022),  Barcelona School of Economics (Barcelona 2022), Economics of Migration Junior Seminar (Florence 2022),  EUI Multidisciplinary Research Workshop (2022),  Applied Young Economist Webinar (2022),  EUI Microeconometrics Working Group (2021). 

We show that the expected real wages commanded by some higher-education degrees decreased in absolute terms in France, in the past two decades, and that this drop is not due to adverse selection. To study the returns to degrees and experience, we assume the existence of a finite number of latent types and estimate a finite-mixture model. Each type has its own log-wage equation, experience-accumulation and education-choice equation. This allows us to decompose the treatment effects of education as an average of type-dependent effects. We then show that some unobserved types experienced a real-wage drop while others benefited from an increase, with the same degree. The observed “flattening” of returns to experience is also heterogeneous. In the case of Master degrees, the estimated distribution of latent types indicates that student selection improved with time, in spite of the fact that the number of graduates increased substantially. An excess supply of graduates might therefore be a likely explanation for the devaluation of Master’s degrees.

Presented at:  ESEM (Rotterdam 2024-scheduled 29 of August),  EUI Microeconometrics Working Group (2022).

Using Danish administrative data, we study how individuals' skill set composition affects self-selection into entrepreneurship. We measure analytical and communication skills with high school grades in math and Danish. We observe a positive complementarity between math and Danish language grades in predicting individuals' self-selection into entrepreneurship: for students with high math grades, the probability of starting a business is monotonically increasing with their oral grade in Danish, while this is not the case for the rest of the population. We exploit within-school, across-cohort variation in students' exposure to peers whose fathers have a university degree in the humanities to causally estimate the effect of increasing communication skills on the probability of becoming an entrepreneur for the population of high-performing math students. We find that the individual at the 90th percentile of the treatment distribution has a 0.34 percentage point higher probability of becoming an entrepreneur in her late thirties than the individual at the 10th percentile of the treatment distribution. This effect is equal to 9\% of the share of entrepreneurs in the economy. As students who perform well in math run, on average, more profitable and larger businesses, we highlight the importance of improving the communication skills of individuals with high analytical abilities to incentivize the creation of high-performing firms.

Presented at:  The 1st International Conference of the Georgian Economic Association (Tbilisi 2024), DEF LUISS Internal Seminar (Rome 2023),  EUI Microeconometrics Working Group (Florence 2024).

We examine how entrepreneurial wealth concentration impacts firm performance, leveraging Danish registry data. We define  concentration as the ratio of an entrepreneur's business ownership value to their total personal wealth. Using the divorce of a minority shareholder as a shock to entrepreneurial concentration—likely due to entrepreneurs buying out the minority stake—we find that increased concentration reduces the average return on equity and its variability, along with declines in sales, employment, assets, debt, and leverage. These findings support the idea that greater wealth exposure to the business leads entrepreneurs to adopt lower-risk, lower-return strategies, potentially resulting in significant social costs.

Presented at:  HEC Paris Entrepreneurship Workshop (Paris, 2024)