Fabrizio Colella

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​I am a PhD Student in Economics at HEC - University of Lausanne.  I recently visited the Center for Labor Economics at UC Berkeley.

Research interests: Labor Economics, Microeconometrics 
Affiliations: Fondazione Rodolfo DeBenedetti

Please download my CV for more information.

​You can contact me by email at: fabrizio.colella@unil.ch 
LATEST NEWS 📢📢📢:  
​
My research on racism, supporters and football players' performance is featured on The Economist 
​Non-white footballers played better when stadiums were empty during the pandemic 

RESEARCH

Working Papers
Firm Gender Preferences, Hiring Discrimination and Effective Recruitment
with David Card, and Rafael Lalive
[pdf availble upon request]
In June 2004 the Austrian Equal Treatment Act banned the use of gender preferences in vacancy and recruiting notices. At the time over 40% of posted vacancies in the nation’s largest job board included explicit preferences for either male or female applicants. We use data on posted vacancies, merged to administrative records on employer workforces and on the gender of workers hired to fill vacancies, to study how the legal prohibition of gender preferences affected hiring rates of women and men and the degree of gender segregation across firms. Consistent with recent evidence from China (Kuhn et al., 2018), we show that in the pre-2004 period employers with a stated preference were very likely (>90%) to hire a worker of that gender. We also show that most firms advertising for men had a high fraction of male employees and were seeking to fill a job in a highly-male occupation, with the opposite pattern for those advertising for women. Nevertheless, a small minority of employers appear to have been using gender preferences to recruit against stereotypes. Within two years of the new law, stated gender preferences in Austrian job ads largely disappeared, and employers were posting vacancies using both female and male versions of the occupation title. Classifying firms based on their share of female employees and their industry sector, we show that the elimination of gender preferences led to a 2.0-2.5 percentage point rise in the fraction of females hired by firms that were most likely to advertise for male workers in the per-2004 period, and a 1.0-1.5 percentage point rise in the fraction of males hired by firms that were most likely to advertise for females. We conclude that the law had a systematic but modest effect on reducing gender segregation across firms.
Inference with Arbitrary Clustering  
with Rafael Lalive, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli, and Mathias Thoenig 
IZA Discussion Paper n. 12584
​[pdf]
[Stata package acreg]
Analyses of spatial or network data are now very common. Nevertheless, statistical inference is challenging since unobserved heterogeneity can be correlated across neighboring observational units. We develop an estimator for the variance-covariance matrix (VCV) of OLS and 2SLS that allows for arbitrary dependence of the errors across observations in space or network structure and across time periods. As a proof of concept, we conduct Monte Carlo simulations in a geospatial setting based on U.S. metropolitan areas. Tests based on our estimator of the VCV asymptotically correctly reject the null hypothesis, whereas conventional inference methods, e.g., those without clusters or with clusters based on administrative units, reject the null hypothesis too often. We also provide simulations in a network setting based on the IDEAS structure of coauthorship and real-life data on scientific performance. The Monte Carlo results again show that our estimator yields inference at the correct significance level even in moderately sized samples and that it dominates other commonly used approaches to inference in networks. We provide guidance to the applied researcher with respect to (i) whether or not to include potentially correlated regressors and (ii) the choice of cluster bandwidth. Finally, we provide a companion statistical package (acreg) enabling users to adjust the OLS and 2SLS coefficient’s standard errors to account for arbitrary dependence.
All you Need is Love: The Effect of Moral Support on Behavior
(an earlier version circulated under the title "You'll Never Walk Alone: The Effect of Moral Support on Performance")
with  Patricio Dalton  and  Giovanni Giusti
CentER Discussion Paper; Vol. 2021-005 
[pdf]
​Press:  Quartz,  Uno, TN
This study presents unique empirical evidence on the importance of moral support for performance. We take advantage of an unusual change in Argentinean football legislation. In August 2013, as a matter of National security, the Argentinean government forced all teams in the first division to play their games with only home team supporters. Supporters of visiting teams were not allowed to be in stadiums during league games. We estimate the effect of this exogenous variation of supporters on team performance, and find that visiting teams are, on average, about 20% more likely to lose without the presence of their supporters. As a counterfactual experiment, we run the analysis using contemporaneous cup games, where the visiting team supporters were allowed to attend, and find no effect of the ban on those games. Moreover, the ban does not affect the decisions of referees, the lineups or the market value of the teams, suggesting that the effect on team performance is due to the loss of moral support rather than other factors. Finally, we find that moral support is more relevant, and often pivotal, when there is balance of power between the two teams, suggesting that moral support compensates the power of monetary resources. This paper provides a proof of concept of moral support as an important non-monetary resource, even in settings with high monetary incentives. 
Work in Progress
The Effect of Trade on Skill Requirements: Evidence from Job Postings​​
Are supporters good for all? The effect of closed stadiums on performance of white and non-white football players
​Press:  The Economist
 
Explaining the Retirement Consumption Puzzle Using the LISS Panel 
with Arthur van Soest
Policy
Disruption of the Swiss labor market: 2020 Corona crisis and 2008 Financial crisis compared
with Marius Brülhart, Monika Bütler, Luca Crivelli, David Dorn, Tobias Lehmann, Michael Siegenthaler, Jan-Egbert Sturm and Beatrice Weder di Mauro
Policy brief for the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force (NCS-TF) ​
[pdf]

TEACHING

HEC - University of Lausanne
Labor Economics and Policy - (Master in Economics) - Teacher  
Fall 2020 - Average Teaching Evaluation: 88/100 - REPORT 2020
​Econometrics - (Master in Economics and PhD) - TA for Rafael Lalive and Michele Pellizzari  
Fall 2017/18/19 - Average Teaching Evaluation: 86/100 - REPORT 2017, REPORT 2018, REPORT 2019
European Integration and International Trade - ​(Bachelor in Economics and Management) - TA for Marius Brülhart
Spring 2017/18/20/21 - Teaching Evaluation not available

CONTACT

Department of Economics
University of Lausanne
Quartier UNIL-Chamberonne
Bâtiment Internef - office 532
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland ​
fabrizio.colella@unil.ch​
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment
University of California, Berkeley
2521 Channing Way # 5555
Berkeley 
CA 94720-5555
​USA​
fabrizio.colella@berkeley.edu

REFERENCES

Rafael Lalive
Department of Economics
University of Lausanne
Quartier UNIL-Chamberonne
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland ​
rafael.lalive@unil.ch
David Card
Center for Labor Economics
​Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall, M.C. 3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880​
card@berkeley.edu
Mathias Thoenig
Department of Economics
University of Lausanne
Quartier UNIL-Chamberonne
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland ​
mathias.thoenig@unil.ch