We study how foreign language proficiency affects brain drain by exploiting the heterogeneous exposure of Albania to Italian television in the second half of the twentieth century. We document that, due to geographical proximity, the Italian TV signal accidentally reached Albania and, conditional on geographic conditions, Albanians' exposure to the signal was as good as random. We find that exposure to Italian TV led to a considerable increase in Italian proficiency rates and strongly increased the probability of migrating of highly skilled individuals while not affecting other skill groups. We rule out other channels through which TV might affect migration and interpret our findings as the effect of foreign language proficiency on brain drain.

Presented at: ENS de Lyon- University of Bologna Junior PhD Workshop 2025 (Bologna, 2025), Stata Conference (Marseilles, 2025), AMSE (Marseille, 2024) ,European Winter Meeting EWMES (Palma de Mallorca, 2024), Junior Economics of Migration Seminar (Online, 2024), The 1st International Conference of the Georgian Economic Association (Tbilisi 2024), DEF LUISS Internal Seminar (Rome, 2023), The Junior Workshop on the Economics of Migration (Paris 2023), EUI Migration Working Group (Florence, 2022),  IFO CEMIR Junior Economist Workshop  (Munich 2022),  Barcelona School of Economics (Barcelona, 2022), Economics of Migration Junior Seminar (Florence, 2022),  EUI Multidisciplinary Research Workshop (Florence, 2022),  Applied Young Economist Webinar (Online, 2022),  EUI Microeconometrics Working Group (Florence, 2021) 

We study how the returns to higher education evolved in France during a period of educational expansion. We study possible changes in the mix of unobservable characteristics of the population of graduates. Using a finite mixture model with latent types, we estimate type-specific log-wage, experience accumulation, and education-choice equations. We find that expected real wages declined for higher-education degrees, and that this is not driven by adverse selection. Returns to education and experience decreased for certain unobserved types but increased for others. The composition of types among Master’s graduates suggests improved student selection over time, despite rising graduate numbers.

Presented at:  INTEDU (Modena, 2025), ETEPP (Aussois, 2025)*, AMSE (Marseilles, 2024)* ,ESEM (Rotterdam, 2024), Università Ca' Foscari (Venezia, 2024)* ,EUI Microeconometrics Working Group (Florence, 2022)

*By co-authors

Using Danish registry data, we examine how entrepreneurial wealth concentration—the extent to which an entrepreneur’s personal wealth is tied to their business—affects firm performance. We exploit minority shareholder divorces as an exogenous shock to concentration, as entrepreneurs often buy out minority stakes following a divorce. Our findings show that increased concentration lowers the average return on equity, reduces its variability, and decreases the firm's default probability. Firms also experience declines in sales, employment, assets, debt, and leverage. These results suggest that greater wealth exposure to the business leads entrepreneurs to adopt lower-risk, lower-return strategies, dampening economic growth and job creation. A conservative counterfactual exercise indicates that capping all entrepreneurs' stakes at 51\% would increase average ROE by 5 percentage points and boost employment and sales by 6\%.

Presented at: EIEF Lunch Seminar (Rome, 2025)* , EUI Alumni Conference (Florence, 2025), Workshop on: "Information, Firms' Performance and Workers' Careers" (LUISS, Rome, 2025) ,DEF LUISS Internal Seminar (Rome, 2025) , HEC Paris Entrepreneurship Workshop (Paris, 2024)

 Using Danish administrative data, we study how individuals' skill set composition affects self-selection into entrepreneurship. We measure analytical and communication skills with high school grades in math and Danish. We observe a positive complementarity between math and Danish language grades in predicting individuals' self-selection into entrepreneurship: for students with high math grades, the probability of starting a business is monotonically increasing with their oral grade in Danish, while this is not the case for the rest of the population. We exploit within-school, across-cohort variation in students' exposure to peers whose fathers have a university degree in the humanities to causally estimate the effect of increasing communication skills on the probability of becoming an entrepreneur for the population of high-performing math students. We find that the individual at the 90th percentile of the treatment distribution has a 0.34 percentage point higher probability of becoming an entrepreneur in her late thirties than the individual at the 10th percentile of the treatment distribution. This effect is equal to 9\% of the share of entrepreneurs in the economy. As students who perform well in math run, on average, more profitable and larger businesses, we highlight the importance of improving the communication skills of individuals with high analytical abilities to incentivize the creation of high-performing firms. 

Presented at:  The 1st International Conference of the Georgian Economic Association (Tbilisi, 2024)*,  EUI Microeconometrics Working Group (Florence, 2024), DEF LUISS Internal Seminar (Rome, 2023)