Claudio Luccioletti

Economics PhD Candidate

CEMFI

Welcome to my website! I am an Economics PhD candidate at CEMFI.

My primary interests are Macroeconomics, Spatial Economics and Labor Economics.

I will be on the 2023/2024 academic job market.

claudio.luccioletti@cemfi.edu.es

Download my CV

Job Market Paper

Luccioletti (2023). Should Governments Subsidize Homeownership? A Quantitative Analysis of Spatial Housing Policies. Draft coming soon.

Abstract

Should governments promote homeownership? Although such policies are widespread, subsidizing homeownership can reduce internal migration and increase the spatial misallocation of labor. To address this question, I build a dynamic spatial equilibrium model with coresidence, homeownership, internal migration, and savings decisions. Homeownership provides utility and insurance against aggregate rental price risk but reduces migration due to the transaction costs associated with selling the property. Migration decisions, in turn, affect homeownership. Non-migrant workers can coreside with their parents, which allows them to save and buy a house earlier than migrants. Additionally, individuals can access housing bequests by remaining in or returning to their birthplace. I estimate the model for Spain and validate it using quasi-experimental evidence from recent place-based homeownership subsidies. I find that mortgage interest deduction policies are welfare-increasing, have majority support, and reduce wealth inequality. However, they decrease internal migration and do not reduce the spatial misallocation of labor.

Working Papers

Luccioletti (2022). Labor Market Power Across Cities.
Revise and resubmit at Journal of the European Economic Association.

Slides Working Paper Latest Version Abstract

Workers in larger cities are paid higher wages. The city-size wage premium may reflect the productivity gains from agglomeration or sorting of more productive workers in densely populated areas. However, local labor markets in large cities have more firms and are expected to be more competitive, which could also generate part of the urban earnings premium. I quantify the importance of this channel with rich administrative data for Spain using a spatial equilibrium model to guide the empirical strategy. To address the identification challenge posed by labor market power and wages moving endogenously with unobserved local productivity shocks, I first control for firms’ revenues per worker and for time trends that are heterogeneous across local labor markets. I then develop a new instrumental variable that leverages quasi-experimental variation in monopsony power stemming from changes over time in the size of local public firms. I conclude that 20–30% of the city-size wage premium can be attributed to differences in labor market power across locations.

Work in Progress

Labor Market Power in a Spatial Equilibrium (with Sophie Mathes and John Morehouse)

Abstract

Quantitative spatial models typically assume that local labor markets are competitive. We assess to what extent this assumption is justified, or whether there is systematic heterogeneity in competitiveness across space. We use a discrete choice framework to model the sorting of workers across cities and industries, and couple it with spatially distant employers who compete for labor strategically in a general equilibrium model. Local monopsony power varies by how costly it is for workers to relocate or switch industry, and by the number and relative size of employers engaging in wage competition in each local labor market. We use the model to estimate wage markdowns that are spatially heterogeneous and differ by workers' education level.