Davide Alonzo
Education
MA Economics and Finance, LUISS University, 2014
QTEM degree, Université Libre de Bruxelles and Université de Lausanne, 2014
BA Economics and Management, LUISS University, 2012
About
My research interests are in Macroeconomics, Labour Economics with a specific focus on the role played by intra-household bargaining in the determination of the household’s behavior in the labor market.
My job market paper studies the interaction between marriage and migration decisions. The paper analyzes how migration prospects affect the selection into marriage and how marriage influences the geographical distribution of the labor force.
Publications
JOB MARKET PAPER
Does geographic heterogeneity in occupational returns affect the patterns of family formation and dissolution? And do marriage choices matter for the geographic distribution of workers? This paper examines the effects of geographic heterogeneity in occupational returns on marriage and divorce, and the impact of family formation on the geographic allocation of labor. We document that geographically mismatched workers -- those living in a location that pays relatively lower wages in their occupation -- are less likely to marry and more likely to divorce. Moreover, conditional on marrying, mismatched workers are more likely to be married to similarly mismatched partners. To account for these observations, we develop an equilibrium model of migration and family formation, and we estimate it using microdata for the US. Through counterfactual experiments, we assess both individual and aggregate implications of joint marriage and location choices. We find that, while at the individual level entering a marriage reduces wage growth, in aggregate the presence of marriage markets and the endogeneity of marriage market conditions enhance productivity by attracting workers to high return locations. [GO TO PAPER]
WORKING PAPER
We characterize the distribution of occupation-specific worker surplus for different demographic groups in the US labor market. We combine information about earnings and the distribution of workers across jobs to separately identify systematic pecuniary and non-pecuniary components of worker surplus. We then use variation in estimated worker-job match values to (i) recover labor factor productivity across occupation and demographic groups, and (ii) estimate substitution intensity between heterogeneous job inputs. Through counterfactual exercises, we quantify the extent to which technological progress, as opposed to shifts in the heterogeneous valuations of identical jobs, account for structural transformation in the labor market.[GO TO PAPER]
WORK IN PROGRESS
We merge data on the nutritional content of a subset of packaged (bar-code level) food products to longitudinal home-scanner data on the shopping behavior of US households. We use a Random Forest regression to impute the nutritional content of the remaining food products. The resulting dataset is used to study the association between marital status and the dietary habits of the household's members.
Uncertainty about the fundamental aspects of the evolution of infections in the population (e.g. the infection rate and the fraction of infected population) is a prominent feature of newly discovered viruses. This paper studies the role of early testing as a tool on the hands of the policymaker for learning about the structural parameters underlying the evolution of a pandemic. The paper analyses the informational content of testing at the different stages of a pandemic and how learning through testing interacts with other instruments in the definition of the optimal policy.
Awards
- President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award, UBC, 2020
- CIDE Small Grants in Innovative Data, UBC, 2019
- Best 2nd Year Research Paper Prize, UBC, 2017.
- David Dodge Graduate Scholarship in Economics, UBC, 2017
- John Helliwell Prize in Macroeconomics (top performance in first year Ph.D.), UBC, 2016
- Four Year Doctoral Fellowship, UBC, 2015 – 2019
- International Tuition Award, UBC, 2015 – 2017
Teaching
Teaching Assistant
University of British Columbia
- ECON 603 – Macroeconomics II (Ph.D.): 2017-2018-2019
- ECON 602 – Macroeconomics I (Ph.D.): 2016-2017-2018
- ECON 594 – Applied Economics (Master’s): 2019
- ECON 456 – International Macroeconomics and Finance (Undergraduate): 2020
- ECON 302 – Intermediate Macroeconomic Analysis I (Undergraduate): 2018-2019
Luiss University
- Advanced Macroeconomics (Master’s): 2015
Guest Lecturer
- ECON 516 – Topics in Macroeconomics (Ph.D.), Fortran and High-Performance Computing: 2017-2018-2019-2020