Education

• • Ph.D. in Economics

    2015 - Present

  • Princeton University

• • M.A. in Economics

    2017

  • Princeton University

• • M.A. in Economics and Finance

    2014

  • University of Naples Federico II

• • B.A. in Economics

    2012

  • University of Naples Federico II

Working Papers

• • Heterogeneous Risk Exposure and the Dynamics of Wealth Inequality

    Job Market Paper

  • In this paper I argue that the dynamics of wealth inequality are largely driven by heterogeneous exposure to aggregate risk in asset returns. I propose a quantitative model of households' optimal portfolio choice that builds on evidence that housing is a necessary good. The model replicates households' portfolio heterogeneity along the wealth distribution: just like in the data, as households get wealthier they shift their portfolios away from safe assets, first towards housing, and then towards equity. Because households in different parts of the wealth distribution are exposed to different sources of aggregate risk, the model has strong implications for the evolution of inequality. In particular, temporary shocks in equity returns have large and persistent effects on top wealth shares. A key implication is that the observed rise in U.S. wealth inequality was mostly due to abnormal equity returns and it is therefore expected to revert back to lower levels.

• • Wealth Inequality at the Top: Down to the Roots

    (joint with G. Sorg-Langhans and M. Vogler)

  • Multiple theories of inequality compete to explain U.S. wealth inequality and the share of wealth held by the top one percent. To what extent does it matter which of these models we rely on? In this paper we analyze the responses of the different theories to a host of policy experiments. To this end, we form a quantitative model that nests the competing channels and assesses the effects of policy experiments by sequentially shutting off all but one of these model mechanisms. Our model is directly calibrated on the wealth distribution which allows us to starkly contrast the different theories and clearly understand the mechanisms at work. We find stark differences in predictions across channels for a given policy experiment, indicating that, by choosing a particular mechanism, researchers might already predetermine the outcome of their policy experiments.

Work in Progress

• • When Does Wealth Inequality Matter for Asset Pricing?

  • In this paper we show that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the wealth distribution does matter for the determination of asset prices. We do so by showing that, in a model in which households' equity share is increasing in wealth, approximate aggregation does not hold and households make systematic errors when trying to forecast prices ignoring wealth inequality. In order to understand the effect of inequality on asset prices, we solve a two-assets general equilibrium model of wealth inequality and use recent advances from scientific machine learning to extend the algorithm in Villaverde et al. (2020) to solve systems of neural stochastic differential equations for the aggregate states. Finally, we look at how the introduction of such GE feedback between wealth inequality and asset prices changes our understanding of the effects of government policy.

Fields

Macroeconomics, Finance, Household Finance, Inequality

Visiting Positions

• • Federal Reserve Board

    Washington, DC

  • Dissertation Fellow (virtual)

    Summer 2021

• • Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

    St. Louis, MO

  • Dissertation Intern (virtual workshop due to COVID-19)

    Summer 2020

• • Statistics Norway

    Oslo, Norway

  • Visiting Scholar

    2018 - Present

• • Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre

    Sydney, Australia

  • Visiting Scholar

    Spring 2015

Teaching

• • Graduate - High Performance Computing in Economics

  • Sole Instructor

    2019 - 2021

• • Undergraduate - Intermediate Macroeconomics

  • T.A. for Gianluca Violante

    Spring 2018

• • Undergraduate - Introductory Microeconomics

  • T.A. for Harvey Rosen

    Fall 2018

  • T.A. for Henry Farber

    Fall 2017

Research Activities

• R.A. to Gianluca Violante

  2018 - 2019

• R.A. to Benjamin Moll

  2016 - 2018

• R.A. to Oleg Itskhoki

  2016

• R.A. to Marco Pagano

  2014 - 2015

Honors and Awards

• Griswold Center for Economy Policy Studies Fellowship – Princeton University

  2019 - 2020

• Graduate Fellowship – Princeton University

  2015 - 2019

• Marco Fanno Scholarship – UniCredit & Universities Foundation

  2014 - 2015

• "Messaggeri della Conoscenza" Program Scholarship

  2015

• Best Master Student – University of Naples

  2014

Programming Skills

• Julia, R, Matlab, Stata, SAS, LaTeX

Languages

• Italian (native), English