Welcome to my academic website!

I’m an applied economist passionate about the world of data science, holding a PhD in Economics from LMU University in Munich.

My research interests are Education, Labor, and Political Economics.
I am currently working on understanding how politicians’ debates respond to an increase in the salience of a topic, on how cultural factors affect student achievement, and on the impact of teacher characteristics on student achievement.
In my research, I combine econometric techniques with the analysis of text data and machine learning algorithms. I have undertaken the collection of parliamentary debates and data from social media.

Publications

• The Effect of Teacher Subject-Specific Qualifications on Student Science Achievement
  • Labour Economics, Volume 80, 2023, 102309
  • Related material: pdf, EconPol Policy Brief (non-technical summary in English), ifo Schnelldienst (non-technical summary in German), twitter thread (en, de)
  • Abstract: I investigate the effect of teacher subject-specific qualifications on student science achievement using data from TIMSS 2015, a large-scale assessment of student skills. I exploit the availability of student test scores in four different science subjects—biology, chemistry, physics, and earth science—to test whether teachers holding a subject-specific qualification raise student test scores. Using a within-student within-teacher approach, which controls for student and teacher heterogeneity, I find that teacher subject-specific qualification in one subject increases student test scores by 3.5% of a standard deviation in the same subject. The effect is stronger for female students, especially when they are taught by female teachers, for disadvantaged students, and in lower-performing countries. The mediation analysis reveals that 20% of the effect is explained by teachers feeling more confident to teach topics in subjects in which they hold subject-specific qualifications.

Research

• Can Patience Account for Subnational Differences in Student Achievement? Regional Analysis with Facebook Interests (with Eric A. Hanushek, Lavinia Kinne, and Ludger Woessmann) - NBER Working Paper, CESifo Working Paper, IZA Discussion Paper, covered in Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and VoxEU; twitter/X thread here.
  • Abstract: Decisions to invest in human capital depend on people’s time preferences. We show that differences in patience are closely related to substantial subnational differences in educational achievement, leading to new perspectives on longstanding within-country disparities. We use social-media data – Facebook interests – to construct novel regional measures of patience within Italy and the United States. Patience is strongly positively associated with student achievement in both countries, accounting for two-thirds of the achievement variation across Italian regions and one-third across U.S. states. Results also hold for six other countries with more limited regional achievement data.
• Topic Salience and Political Polarization: Evidence from the German “PISA-Shock” - ifo Working Paper
  • Abstract: Does the salience of a topic affect polarization in related parliamentary debates? When discussing a salient topic, politicians might adopt more extreme stances to gain electoral consensus. Alternatively, they could converge towards more moderate positions to find a compromise. Using parliamentary debates from the 16 German state parliaments, I exploit the exogenous increase in the salience of education induced by the unexpectedly low performance of German students in the PISA 2000 test—the German “PISA shock”. I combine machine-learning and text analysis techniques to obtain topic-specific measures of polarization of parliamentary debates. In a difference-in-differences framework, I find that the PISA shock caused an 8.8% of a standard deviation increase in polarization of education debates compared to other topics. The effect is long-lasting and fades after about six years.
• The Effect of Teacher Characteristics on Students’ Science Achievement - ifo Working Paper, updated version, blog post
  • Abstract: Using TIMSS 2015, an international large-scale assessment of student skills, I investigate the effect of teacher characteristics on student science achievement. My identification strategy exploits the feature that in many education systems different science subjects–physics, biology, chemistry, and earth science–are taught by different teachers. The availability of student test scores as well as teachers’ questionnaires for each of these subjects allows me to implement a within-student approach which controls for unobserved student heterogeneity. I find a positive and weakly significant effect of teacher subject-specific qualifications on student science test scores, equivalent to 1.7% of a standard deviation. Whether teachers hold a Master’s degree, a major in education, or their experience have no significant effect on student science test scores.