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This project studies the distributional effects of international trade policies and shocks via their impact on consumer prices, which may be different across consumer groups who have different consumption baskets.

The main focus of my research is the question of what makes some schools more effective in helping pupils to make academic progress.

Telehealth connects patients to qualified health care professionals via phone. Although its popularity dramatically increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is limited rigorous evidence of its impact, and no impact of its effect in low-income countries. This project investigates the long-term effects of telehealth on health services and outcomes, as well as the impact across gender, income and age groups.

We measure college graduate quality—the average human capital of a college’s graduates—for graduates from 2,800 colleges in 48 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50% more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences: emigrants from poorer countries are highly positively selected on human capital. Finally, we show that these stocks and flows matter for growth and development by showing that college graduate quality predicts the share of a college’s students who become inventors, engage in entrepreneurship, and become top executives both within and across countries.

We propose to study worker and firm views on and willingness to pay for the expansion of job loss insurance in Ethiopia. Job loss insurance consists of payments given to workers after job loss. We propose to interview a representative sample of firms and their workers in the capital city of Addis Ababa, the economic hub of the country.

We measure the contribution of firm-embedded productivity to cross-country income differences. By firm-embedded productivity we refer to firm-specific components of productivity, such as blueprints, management practices, and other intangible capital. Using micro-level data for multinational enterprises (MNEs), we compare market shares of the same MNE in different countries and document that they are systematically larger in less developed countries. This indicates that MNEs face less competition and that firm-embedded productivity is scarce in these countries. We implement a measure of firm-embedded productivity based on this observation. Differences in firm-embedded productivity account for one-third of the cross-country variance in output per worker in our sample.

This project studies the growing importance of high-net-worth individuals (HNWI) in private capital markets. While the role of institutional investors in private markets has already been studied, little attention has been paid to the participation of HNWI in these markets.

Generous maternity leave, affordable daycare, extensive social safety nets, excellent universal health care, and high-quality public schools, are all notable features of Nordic countries. There is a widespread belief that such strong public investments in children contribute to a levelled playing field and promote social mobility. However, gaps in learning outcomes between children of rich and poor parents remain as high in Nordic countries as elsewhere in Europe. One explanation for this paradox is that the equalizing impacts of public investments are undone by parental investments in children of rich and poor families, which are as unequal in Nordic countries as in the rest of the European continent.

The project aims to shed new light on why public support for carbon taxes is so low, despite the crucial role that many economists and environmental campaigners believe they could play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating climate change.

This paper studies the extent to which the cyclicality of occupational mobility shapes that of aggregate unemployment and its duration distribution. We document the relation between workers' occupational mobility and unemployment duration over the long run and business cycle.