Alberto Polo

When lenders screen borrowers using a menu, they generate a contractual externality by rendering the composition of their competitors’ borrowers worse. Using data from the UK mortgage market and a structural model of screening with endogenous menus, this paper quantifies the impact of asymmetric information on equilibrium contracts and welfare. Counterfactual simulations show that, because of the externality, there is too much screening along the loan-to-value dimension. The deadweight loss, expressed in borrower utility, is equivalent to an interest rate increase of 30 basis points (a 15% increase) on all loans.

Journal article | Ungated version

We estimate intergenerational income mobility in Italy using administrative data from tax returns. Our estimates of mobility are higher than prior work using survey data and indirect methods. The rank- rank slope of parent-child income is 0.22, compared to 0.18 in Denmark and 0.34 in the United States. The probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 0.11. We uncover substantial geographical variation: upward mobility is much stronger in northern Italy, where provinces have higher measured school quality, more stable families, and more favorable labor market conditions.

Journal article | Ungated version

Coverage (in Italian): articolo di Linkiesta.it, articolo de Il Foglio, articolo di lavoce.info

Coverage (in English): video of the presentation at the FRdB Conference

We use UK microdata to estimate the effect of working-from-home (WFH) on UK wages. Leveraging differences in exposure to remote work across occupations around the Covid-19 pandemic, we find that a 1 percentage point increase in remote work increased real weekly wages by 8 basis points between 2019 and 2022. This translates into a gap in real wage growth that is 3 percentage points larger for occupations in the top quintile by share of WFH, relative to the bottom. It can account for around half of the 2.7% increase in mean real wages over this period. More than 50% of the impact of remote work on wages is due to hours worked, and in particular to a decrease in part-time work, with the remaining share due to firm-level factors.

May 2024 version

I document three salient features of the transmission of monetary policy shocks: imperfect pass-through to deposit rates, impact on credit spreads, and substitution between deposits and other bank liabilities. I develop a monetary model consistent with these facts, where banks have market power on deposits, a duration-mismatched balance sheet, and a dividend-smoothing motive. A key novelty is that deposit demand has a dynamic component, as in the literature on customer markets. A financial friction makes non-deposit funding supply imperfectly elastic. The model indicates that imperfect pass-through to deposit rates is an important source of amplification of monetary policy shocks.

October 2023 version

September 2018 version