I am an economist interested in firm dynamics and their relevance for aggregate economic questions. My research is in the fields of macroeconomics, international trade and entrepreneurship. I received my PhD from NYU in 2018 and am currently a Research Economist at the Bank of Portugal and a member of the Business and Economics Research Unit at Católica-Lisbon.

Visiting UPF. In the fall of 2025 I am visitng UPF.

Publications

What's Driving the Decline in Entrepreneurship?
Journal of Monetary Economics, 2025, 154:103812
Appendix

This paper documents new facts about the decline in entrepreneurship in the US and interprets them with an occupational choice model. Skill-biased technical change can account for much of the decline in the relative entrepreneurship rate of more educated people, but cannot explain the decline in the aggregate level of entrepreneurship. The major factors driving the aggregate changes are rising entry costs and outsized productivity gains by large non-entrepreneur firms.

On the Cleansing Effect of Recessions and Government Policy: Evidence from Covid-19 (with Pedro Moreira and Cezar Santos)
European Economic Review, 2022, 144:104097

Covid-19 had a cleansing effect on the intensive margin, with higher-productivity firms being more successful at maintaining employment. But the exit rate of low productivity firms did not increase, and government support disproportionately went to these firms.

What are Uncertainty Shocks? (with Anna Orlik and Laura Veldkamp)
Journal of Monetary Economics, 2018, 100:1–15
Ungated version | VoxEU article

Macro volatility on its own can generate realistic fluctuations in a range of commonly used, and seemingly distinct, uncertainty measures: micro dispersion (cross-sectional variance of firm-level outcomes), higher-order uncertainty (disagreement) and macro uncertainty (uncertainty about macro outcomes).

Working papers

Demand Learning, Customer Capital and Exporter Dynamics (with Spencer Lyon)
November 2023

Trade costs are critical for understanding the gains from trade. We reassess these taking into account firm dynamics driven by customer accumulation and information frictions, and reassess the gains from trade.

Beyond Risk: Firm Financing and Interest Rates (with Miguel H. Ferreira)
June 2025

There is far more dispersion in interest rates on bank loans than loan characteristics and firm risk can account for. Latent firm characteristics are the most important source of variation. We provide a search-based theory to explain this.

When Trade Compresses: The Effect of Liberalization on Wage Inequality (with Victor Hernandez Martinez and Roman Merga)
October 2025

There is a general perception that trade increases inequality. In the case of Spain's integration into the Eruopean Single Market in the 1990s, the opposite occurred. The effect of trade liberalization on inequality depends on the skill distribution across industries.

Work in progress

Financial Frictions and Firm Support (with Miguel Faria-e-Castro and Nuno Paixão)

Entrepreneurial Risk and Efficiency (with Baxter Robinson)