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 propose a quantitative theory for the dynamics of wealth inequality based on heterogeneous exposure to aggregate risk in asset returns. I develop an optimal portfolio choice model in which housing is a necessary good and households endogenously shift their portfolios towards riskier assets as they get wealthier. Since households are exposed to different sources of aggregate return risk, wealth inequality naturally responds to movements in asset returns. I show that return shocks have large and persistent effects on wealth inequality and that the model replicates the U-shape observed in top U.S. wealth shares since the 1960s.

• • 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 study the interaction between wealth inequality and asset prices by developing a framework featuring heterogeneous agents, endogenous portfolio choice, and aggregate risk. We solve the model globally under the assumption of limited information: agents forecast prices directly using observable aggregate variables, which makes the problem computationally tractable without sacrificing the economic mechanism. We approximate the drift and volatility of the perceived price process with neural networks and find that, while the drift component of the evolution of prices is close to linear, the volatility is highly nonlinear. This asymmetry endogenously generates time variation in risk premia that local approximation methods cannot produce and that is key to explaining the interaction between inequality and asset returns: through heterogeneous portfolio exposure, aggregate shocks reshape the wealth distribution, which in turn feeds back into asset prices and asset demand through market clearing.

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