This paper studies how expected career and non-career returns shape migration decisions among highly educated young adults from lagging regions in advanced economies. I collect data on subjective expectations at the time of decision-making under three counterfactual migration scenarios: no migration, return migration, and long-term migration. First, I document strong anticipated trade-offs between career and personal life outcomes across alternatives. Second, to disentangle preferences from beliefs, I incorporate ex-ante returns into a life-cycle utility model. The results show that non-career factors overweigh career considerations in expected choices and welfare, explaining why short-term migration is preferred over long-term migration. Third, counterfactuals reveal that removing the expected benefits of short-term migration leads most short-term migrants to opt for no migration rather than long-term migration, with responses varying by ability. The relative role of each expected benefit on planning to return also depends on ability. For instance, anticipated career gains upon return matter only for the highest-ability individuals. Finally, I find that promoting short-term migration is about three times more cost-effective for high-ability individuals who initially plan to stay than for those planning long-term migration, underscoring the challenge of retaining talent in lagging regions. A follow-up survey confirms that initial expectations strongly predict realized migration choices and outcomes. These findings highlight the central role of non-career factors in migration decisions and provide new insights for designing cost-effective policies to retain talent.

Presented at: SAEe (Valencia, December 2022), SOLE (Philadelphia, May 2023), BSE Summer Forum (Barcelona, June 2023), Workshop on Subjective Expectations (Bocconi-Milan, June 2023), Workshop on Migration and Family Economics (IESEG-Paris, June 2023), EEA-ESEM (Barcelona, August 2023), EALE (Prague, September 2023), WB-IDB HUMANS Seminar (Washington, March 2024), CUNEF Universidad (Madrid, April 2024)

with Nagore Iriberri. R&R at the International Economic Review

We study the evolution of gender gaps, both in terms of representation and research output, among cohorts of scholars in economics over the past 9 decades (1933-2019) using a sample of economists who have published at least once in any of the 36 high impact journals (Card et al., 2022). With respect to representation, there has been a clear increase of the female share among scholars, but we find evidence of both vertical segregation based on prominence and horizontal segregation based on research fields. With respect to gender gaps in output, women publish fewer articles than men, and more concerningly, the negative gender gap showed no sign of convergence since the 1940s, although there is substantial heterogeneity in the type of publication. The negative gender gap in publications is mostly explained by women having shorter active academic careers.

with Josep Amer-Mestre and Marta C. Lopes. Applied Economics (2024)

We study the impact of COVID-19 school closures on differences in online learning usage by regional academic performance. Using data from Google Trends in Italy, we find that during the first lockdown, regions with a previously lower academic performance increased their searches for e-learning tools more than higher-performing regions. Analysing school administrative and survey data before the pandemic, we find that both teachers and students in lower performing regions were using no less e-learning tools than higher performing ones. These two findings suggest that the COVID-19 shock widened the e-learning usage gap between academically lower and higher-performing regions. Exploiting the regional variation in school closure mandates during the 2020/2021 academic year, we report that the patterns detected after the first lockdown were no longer present. Regions with different previous academic performance had the same response in terms of online learning usage when faced with stricter school closures.