Zanella, Simone
Contact Information
Available for interviews at
European Job Market for Economists (EEA)
Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA)
CV Job Market Paper
Research Interests
Macroeconomics, Labor Economics and Spatial Economics
Placement Officer
Edouard Schaal
[email protected]
References
Isaac Baley (Advisor)
[email protected]
Edouard Schaal (Advisor)
[email protected]
Elisa Giannone (Advisor)
[email protected]
Research
Wealth and the Geography of Job Ladders (Job Market Paper).
Workers’ wealth shapes career dynamics by influencing job search and migration decisions. While economic opportunities concentrate in large cities, high living costs often prevent many workers from taking advantage of them. I propose a theory in which wealth interacts with spatial search frictions to explain why some individuals remain stuck in low-paying jobs at the bottom of the ladder while others climb to the top. In the model, high living costs in productive cities amplify the trade-off between wages and unemployment risk, strengthening precautionary motives that lead low-wealth workers to accept lower-paying jobs. To motivate and estimate the model, I use French administrative data. Empirically, I document two key facts. First, job ladder heterogeneity across cities is larger for low-wealth workers. Second, financialmconstraints limit upward mobility by reducing access to high-wage jobs in productive cities. The estimated model replicates these patterns and shows that disproportionate sorting of low-wealth workers into low-paying jobs in high-productivity locations amplifies wage and wealth inequality. Altogether, the model accounts for about 30% of the wage inequality observed in the data, of which roughly two-thirds is due to local job ladder heterogeneity. Finally, place-based policies that improve insurance against earnings risk in high-productivity cities lead to welfare gains by enabling financially constrained workers to access steeper job ladders.