Gabriele Lucchetti

Welcome to my website!

I am a labour economist studying how labour market structure and worker–firm interactions shape flexibility and migration outcomes.

My work focuses on the allocation of workers across firms and locations, working-time arrangements, wage determination, and job design.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at The ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin).

I am also a Research Affiliate at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Research Associate at the Berlin School of Economics.

E-mail: glu[at]rfberlin.com

Working Papers

Human Capital, Amenities, and Distortions: The Immigrant Earnings Gap across Space

The paper received the "Peter Sinclair Prize" as the 3rd best paper at the Macro, Monetary and Finance (MMF) PhD Conference [pdf]

Using US microdata, I document three stylized facts on immigrants' labor market outcomes across space. First, the city-size earnings premium is half as large for immigrants as for natives. Second, there is substantial heterogeneity by origin: immigrants from high-income countries earn a premium exceeding that of natives, while immigrants from low-income countries earn a substantially smaller premium. Third, as cities grow, natives and high-income country immigrants increasingly sort into cognitive occupations, while low-income country immigrants do not. To study these facts, I build a quantitative spatial general equilibrium model where technology favors cognitive skills, workers differ in human capital and tastes for cities and occupations, and immigrants face local labor market distortions. Full equalization of immigrants' human capital, preferences, and labor market conditions to native levels closes 61.8 percent of the immigrant-native earnings gap but widens earnings inequality across cities by 20.2 percent. College immigration expansion narrows the earnings gap at minimal spatial cost, while interventions targeting human capital, preferences, or labor market conditions do not.

Published Work

Unlucky Migrants: Scarring Effect of Recessions on the Assimilation of the Foreign-Born (with Alessandro Ruggieri)

Labour Economics, (2025) 92: 102667, [pdf, online appendix, replication files, journal link]

This paper studies how aggregate labor market conditions affect the intra-generational assimilation of immigrants in the hosting country. Using data from the American Community Survey, we leverage variation in the forecast errors for national and local unemployment rates in the U.S. at the time of arrival of different cohorts of immigrants to identify short- and long-run effects of recessions on their careers. We document that immigrants who enter the U.S. when the labor market is slack face large and persistent earnings reductions: a 1 p.p. rise in the unemployment rate at the time of migration reduces annual earnings by 4.9 percent on impact and 0.7 percent after 12 years since migration, relative to the average U.S. native. This effect is not homogeneous across migrants: males without a college education from low-income countries are the only ones who suffer a scarring effect in their assimilation path. Change in the employment composition across occupations with different skill contents is the key driver: were occupational attainment during periods of high unemployment unchanged for immigrants, assimilation in annual earnings would slow down on average by only 3 years, instead of 12. Slower assimilation costs between 1.7 and 2.5 percent of lifetime earnings to immigrants entering the U.S. labor market when unemployment is high.

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