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 under three counterfactuals: no migration, return migration, and long-term migration. First, I show that individuals anticipate significant trade-offs between effects on career and non-career outcomes. Second, I separate preferences from beliefs by incorporating these ex-ante returns into a life-cycle utility model. Results reveal that personal life factors play a larger role than career considerations in choices and welfare. Third, I perform counterfactual exercises to study the reasons for planning to return, and estimate the cost of promoting this choice among those initially preferring the other options, focusing on differences by ability. My findings help inform the design of policies incentivizing return migration in lagging regions, a way to encourage early-career skill acquisition while retaining talent. A follow-up survey conducted four years later validates the methodology, confirming a strong link between expectations and realizations.

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

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 (2023). DOI:10.1080/00036846.2023.2167924

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.