Working Papers
On the Economics of Cultural Transmission: Welfare Analysis
with Dionysios Papadakis, 2025.
We study the efficiency properties of the dynamics of the distribution of cultural traits at equilibrium. We study both cultural transmission processes (i) governed by parental socialization choices and social interactions; and (ii) mediated by cultural leaders. We define efficiency via a social welfare function over parents’ ex-ante preferences and compare two benchmarks: (a) planner controls only socialization efforts; (b) planner can also reallocate socialization costs across groups. We show that Parental choices are efficient under (a) but are generically inefficient under (b); cultural leaders’ choices are generically inefficient in both cases.
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The Questione Meridionale: Elites and Civil Society
with Giovanni Federico, 2025.
We study the Questione meridionale, that is, the historical socio-economic gap between the North and the South of Italy. We first provide an empirical analysis of conditional convergence by province and by sector, from Unification (1861) until World War I (WWI). We identify literacy as the main bottleneck to the convergence process. On the results of this empirical analysis we ground a theoretical model of the political economy of elites and civil society in the early phases of industrialization. The model allows us to produce qualitative dynamics in line with the main historical narratives. It highlights the role of the land-owning Aristocracy and of the Bourgeoisie controlling socio-economic policies affecting the historical process. We find support for the dynamics and the mechanism leveraging data as well as a political economy event study across Unification and until WWI.
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Non-Stationary Wealth Dynamics and Taxation in the U.S. With an Application to the Racial Gap
with Jess Benhabib and Mi Luo, 2025.
We estimate the parameters of a macroeconomic model of the dynamics of the distribution of wealth. We do not impose any assumption on the stationarity of the process, centering in fact on the transitional dynamics of the wealth distribution in the U.S. from 1962-63 to 2022. We show that the model, at the estimated parameter values, fits well the dynamics of the wealth distribution by accurately producing the dramatic increase in inequality observed in this period. We show how tax reforms – and how agents anticipate them – affect wealth accumulation. We identify (conditions on) future taxation processes which induce the dynamics to be stationary; that is, which lead wealth inequality to settle. Furthermore, we study the dynamics of the racial wealth gap and the relative role of stochastic earnings, differential savings, and capital income risk in driving it.
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The Political Economy of Autocratic Transitions: The Role of Delegation of Violence
with Fabio Enrico Traverso and Thierry Verdier, 2025.
In this paper, we introduce a political economy model of institutional change leading to a transition from democracy to autocracy. A powerful political center lacks commitment to repress surges of instability which threaten the economic elites it represents. A process of institutional delegation of political power to a violent group allows the center to gain the commitment it lacks and to re-establish political stability. The limited forward-looking capacity of the democratic political system, however, induces excessive delegation of power, leading the violent group to establish an autocratic government. The institutional mechanism leading to autocracy delineated in the paper fits well the rise to power of Fascism in Italy after World War I – from 1919 to 1925 – but the main political economy
component of the mechanism we identify are common to several historical transition phenomena.
Replication of “Procrastination, Deadlines and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment”
with Kyle Hyndman, 2025.
We present the results of a replication of Study 2 from Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002). We show that the results of the paper do not replicate. In particular, in the replication, changes in the deadlines have a negligible effect on the three performance metrics and several survey metrics that were used in the original study. Evenly spaced deadlines exogenously imposed on participants do not stand apart for their effectiveness in reducing procrastination in participants. While our replication of the main result fails, our data do show several patterns of participant behavior which should be expected. This suggests to us that our replication attempt is of sufficient quality, but the result itself is not robust.
Marriage, Fertility, and Cultural Integration in Italy,
with Giulia Tura, 2025.
We study cultural integration as an equilibrium outcome of marital matching along cultural and education lines and intra-household investment decisions regarding fertility and cultural socialization. We show that our marriage model allows us to identify cultural-ethnic group specific investment parameters as well as spousal preferences for marital matching. Structural estimates fit the data well and reveal a strong demand to preserve cultural identity on the part of immigrants as well as limited acceptance of the immigrants’ cultural diversity on the part of natives. Furthermore, these estimates reveal a substantial heterogeneity of the parental value of children’s education across cultures. Nonetheless, our estimates imply substantial – though heterogeneous – cultural integration rates across immigrant groups in simulations.
Read Paper — VoxEU — Marginal Revolution — ESWC 2020 (from 1:03:41 to 1:37:02)
Dynamic Linear Economies with Social Interactions,
with Yann Bramoullé and Onur Ozgur, last draft 2018.
Social interactions are arguably at the root of several important socio-economic phenomena, from smoking and other risky behavioral patterns in teens to peer effects in school performance. We study social interactions in linear dynamic economies. For these economies, we are able to (i) obtain several desirable theoretical properties, such as existence, uniqueness, ergodicity; to (ii) develop simple recursive methods to rapidly compute equilibria; and to (iii) characterize several general properties of dynamic equilibria. Furthermore, we show that dynamic forward looking behavior at equilibrium plays an instrumental role in allowing us to (iv) prove a positive identification result both in stationary and non-stationary economies. Finally, we study and sign the bias associated to disregarding dynamic equilibrium, e.g., postulating a sequence of static (myopic) one-period economies, a common practice in empirical work.
Multiple Equilibria,
with Andrea Moro and Giorgio Topa, 2011.
We study a general class of models with social interactions that might display multiple equilibria. We propose an estimation procedure for these models and evaluate its efficiency and computational feasibility relative to different approaches taken to the
curse of dimensionality implied by the multiplicity. Using data on smoking among teenagers, we implement the proposed estimation procedure to understand how group
interactions affect health-related choices. We find that interaction effects are strong both at the school level and at the smaller friends-network level. Multiplicity of equilibria is pervasive at the estimated parameter values, and equilibrium selection accounts for about 15 percent of the observed smoking behavior. Counterfactuals show that student interactions, surprisingly, reduce smoking by approximately 70 percent with respect to the equilibrium smoking that would occur without interactions.
Evolutionary Selection of Modular Decision Architectures,
with Emil Iantchev, 2010.
We study the evolutionary properties of decision processes. We show that a population of agents possessing decision architectures with hierarchically organized modules will have a strictly higher asymptotic growth factor than a population of agents with unitary decision architectures in which the modules are fully connected. Furthermore, we show that internal conflict within agents and behavioral heterogeneity across agents are properties of evolutionary equilibrium. We interpret these results as supporting economic models of multiple decision processes like e.g., planner-doer models.
The Distribution of Wealth and Redistributive Policies in Economies with Infinitely Lived Agents,
with Jess Benhabib, 2007.
We study the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an economy with intergenerational transmission of wealth and redistributive fiscal policy. We characterize the transitional dynamics of the distribution of wealth as well as its stationary state. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is a Pareto distribution. We study analytically the dependence of the distribution of wealth, of wealth inequality, and of utilitarian social welfare on various redistributive fiscal policy instruments like capital income taxes, estate taxes, and welfare subsidies.