Job Market Paper
The Labor Market Effects of Multinational Entry – Draft coming soon.
A constitutional amendment in Brazil in 1995 removed restrictions on foreign investment, triggering a wave of multinational entry. This paper estimates the direct and spillover effects of multinational expansion on worker outcomes. I find that while workers in multinationals and college-educated individuals in domestic firms have higher wages and more job stability, less-educated workers face lower wages, worsened job prospects and higher propensity to move to informality. I then build a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms and workers, labor market frictions, multinational production, and informality to rationalize the observed skill-biased worker reallocation and model counterfactual FDI attraction policies.
Working Papers
[1] Information Frictions, Investment Promotion and Multinational Production: Firm-Level Evidence
(with Jerónimo Carballo and Christian Volpe Martincus) – Last WP version: ECARES WP 2023-02.
Revise and Resubmit at Journal of Development Economics
How do investment promotion agencies (IPAs) influence multinational companies’ decisions on where to establish foreign affiliates? This paper finds that while agency support significantly boosts a firm’s initial investment by resolving information asymmetries, it generally does not affect their subsequent expansion.
[2] Automatic Product Classification in International Trade: Machine Learning & Large Language Models
(with Franco Riottini Depetris and Christian Volpe Martincus) – Last WP version here.
Accepted at Review of International Economics
How can we accurately classify products based on text descriptions? This paper shows that while traditional machine learning models perform poorly outside their training data, large language models consistently achieve 70-90% accuracy, highlighting their value for unstructured data categorization.
Work in Progress
[1] Financial Constraints to Exporting: Evidence from Rwanda’s Export Growth Fund
(with Jie Bai, Lauren Bergquist and Christian Lippitsch) – Funded by IGC, STEG and PEDL.
Governments often enact industrial policies to encourage firms to overcome financial barriers to exporting. In this randomized controlled trial, we evaluate Rwanda’s Export Growth Fund (EGF), which provides large subsidized loans to exporters at preferential interest rates. We generate exogenous variation in loan take-up through a randomized door-to-door marketing campaign
[2] Linkages with Multinationals: The Effect on Domestic Firms’ Exports
(with Jerónimo Carballo, Gianmarco Ottaviano and Christian Volpe Martincus) – Draft coming soon.
Do multinational enterprises affect the internationalization of their local suppliers? Using firm-to-firm data from Uruguay we find that supplying domestically to multinational companies significantly increases the probability of exporting for the first time.
[3] The Value of Organic Certifications
(with Franco Riottini Depetris, Gabriel Scattolo, Christian Volpe Martincus and Lucas Zavala)
How does organic certification impact firms? Relying on both a structural model of voluntary certification along value chains and transaction-level customs data from several countries, we estimate the firm-level effects of USDA organic certification.
[4] Information Constraints in Domestic Supply Chain Linkages
(with Jie Bai, Vittorio Bassi, Lauren Bergquist and Christian Lippitsch) – Funded by IGC.
Multinational firms in low-income countries frequently import inputs because they struggle to identify and verify reliable local suppliers. This project examines these information constraints in Rwanda and pilots through a randomized controlled trial a matching platform to connect large buyers with local suppliers.
