Working papers

School Closures and Parental Labor Supply: Differential Effects of Anticipated and Unanticipated Closures (with Kalaivani Karunanethy and Rafael Lalive)

This paper studies the labor supply responses of parents to anticipated school closures due to school holidays and compares them with responses to unanticipated school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Exploiting regional variation in the timing of school holidays, we find that both fathers and mothers strongly reduce hours worked in response to school holiday closures. For pandemic school closures, we analyze all workers and, separately, workers in occupations resilient to pandemic demand shocks but with limited scope for remote work, who faced the largest childcare constraints. School closures did not differentially reduce hours worked among parents relative to workers without children. On average, parents accommodated the increase in childcare needs without adverse effects on labor supply. In contrast, single mothers and fathers without a tertiary degree experienced significant reductions in hours worked, indicating that adjustment costs were concentrated among more vulnerable family and skill groups.

Work in progress

Do corporate tax cuts affect exporters? (single-authored)

This paper studies how domestic corporate tax cuts affect exporters' outcomes. I exploit sizeable sub-federal tax cuts following a 2020 tax reform in Switzerland, which led some municipalities to reduce corporate tax rates by up to 10 p.p. from an average pre-reform level of about 20 percent. Combining municipality-level corporate tax rates with the universe of Swiss customs export transactions from 2016 to 2023, I implement a difference-in-differences design that compares firms selling the same product to the same destination in the same year, but facing different local tax rates. Elasticity estimates show that a 1% increase in the net-of-tax rate raises export value by 0.62%, an effect that arises mainly because exporters sell more (export weight increases by 0.71%) rather than changes in unit price (-0.09%). To shed light on the underlying mechanism, I compare intra-firm and arm's-length export transactions. I find no strong evidence that intra-firm trade responds systematically differently to the tax cuts, particularly along the price margin. Overall, the findings suggest that lower corporate taxes improve exporters' competitiveness by lowering the user cost of capital, thereby stimulating real export activity rather than reform-induced profit shifting via customs prices.

Firm Tenure vs. Occupation-Specific Human Capital in Job Displacement (with Fabrizio Colella, Rafael Lalive and Alberto Marcato)

Policy work

An Economic Analysis of the US-China Trade Conflict (with Eddy Bekkers)

This paper provides an economic analysis of the trade conflict between the US and China, providing an overview of the tariff increases, a discussion of the background of the trade conflict, and an analysis of the economic effects of the trade conflict, based both on empirics (ex post analysis) and on simulations (ex ante analysis). Bilateral tariffs have increased on average to 17% between the US and China, and the Phase One Agreement signed in January 2020 between the two countries only leads to minor reductions in the tariffs to 16%. The trade conflict has led to a sizeable reduction in trade between the US and China in 2019 and is accompanied by considerable trade diversion to imports from other regions, leading to a reorganization of value chains in (East) Asia. The simulation analysis shows that the direct effects of the tariff increases on the global economy are limited (0.1% reduction in global GDP). The impact of the Phase One Agreement on the global economy is even smaller, although the US is projected to turn real income losses into real income gains because of the Chinese commitments to buy additional US goods. The biggest impact of the trade conflict is provoked by rising uncertainty about trade policy and the paper provides a framework to analyze the uncertainty effects.