Hi, welcome to my website. I am Yannick, a fifth-year PhD student at the European University Institute in Florence, working under the supervision of Andrea Ichino and Alex Monge-Naranjo.

My research interests are mainly in labor and education, focusing on social mobility and inequality.

Find my CV here.

Working Papers

Grants vs. Loans: the Role of Financial Aid in College Major Choice  (Draft)
(w. Adriano De Falco), Revisions Requested at The Economic Journal

Abstract: Using administrative data from Chile, we analyze whether financing higher education through student loans or grants affects the college major choices of prospective university students. We exploit institutional arrangements that allocate either type of financing based on a standardized test to locally identify exogenous variation in access. Students who are marginally eligible for grants are more likely to enroll in STEM-related fields. We provide evidence that this effect is driven by grants acting as an insurance mechanism against uncertainty about degree completion. To do so, we rely on information from past graduates to characterize narrowly defined programs based on dropout rates, time to degree completion, and associated labor market outcomes and estimate a discrete choice model. Students with access to grants value characteristics related to uncertainty about degree completion less negatively than those with student loans.

Are Risk Preferences Shaped By Status Concerns? (Draft)
(w. Dietmar Fehr)

Abstract: We embed an experiment in a large-scale representative survey to investigate the impact of status concerns on the willingness to take risks. While we show that concerns about relative standing in the wealth distribution motivate risk-taking, our results contest the common prediction of higher risk-taking in the middle of the distribution. Instead, we find that respondents who are induced to perceive their relative wealth as low display more tolerance towards risk in a subsequent incentivized lottery task. This effect is not uniform but is mainly driven by individuals who more firmly believe that life outcomes are beyond their control.

Work in Progress

Energy Prices and the Labor Market

Key Idea: the project studies the interplay between costs of living and wages using German registry firm- and linked employer-employee data. Shocks to the cost of living are instrumented following a Bartik-instrument approach by interacting energy expenditure shares at the level of administrative counties with common price series. Preliminary results indicate a considerable pass-through of price shocks into wages, revealing flexibility in local wage setting which partially shields employees from real wage decreases relative to less exposed localities. The empirical evidence on the elasticity of wages to local prices aligns with a theoretical framework of local labor markets inhabited by differentiated firms exhibiting labor market power.