Bruno Esposito
PhD Candidate in Economics
Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia
My research interests are in labor, health, and applied microeconomics.
- Email: bnespo@student.ubc.ca
- My CV is here.
- Code: GitHub
Work in progress
- Centralizing Medical Residency Admissions
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Temporary Job Displacement during Recessions: Short-Time-Work in Brazil
Temporary contract suspension policies allow workers to be suspended from work for a fixed period while receiving unemployment insurance. In some countries, these policies were the primary job insurance measure used to support firms and workers during the COVID-19 recession. Despite their increased use, there is limited evidence on their consequences for workers. In this paper, I study the impact of a temporary contract suspension on workers’ earnings, employment, and wages using administrative data on the universe of formal workers in Brazil. The rich employer-employee linked dataset allows me to identify workers suspended due to the policy and analyze the factors influencing which workers are selected for suspension within firms. I find that temporarily suspended workers face substantial negative effects on earnings, days worked, and log daily wages in the quarter of suspension. However, these losses dissipate almost entirely after one and a half years. When comparing these findings with the costs of a permanent job loss, I find that permanently displaced workers face staggeringly greater losses that persist for more than six quarters. The results suggest that temporary contract suspension policies are effective at mitigating workers’ employment and earnings losses during recessions.
Teaching
- UBC ECON 408, Computational Methods in Macroeconomics TA for Jesse PerlaWinter 2024, 2025
- UBC ECON 526, Quantitative Economics and Data Science TA for Paul Schrimpf and Jesse PerlaFall 2023, 2024, 2025
- Universidad del Pacífico, Statistics 1 Lecturer2021–2022
Pre-PhD papers
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Adaptive Experiments for Policy Choice: Phone Calls for Home Reading in Kenya
Code
Dashboard
Adaptive sampling in experiments with multiple waves can improve learning for “policy choice problems” where the goal is to select the optimal intervention or treatment among several options. This paper uses a real-world policy choice problem to demonstrate the advantages of adaptive sampling and propose solutions to common issues in applying the method. The application is a test of six formats for automated calls to parents in Kenya that encourage reading with children at home. The adaptive ‘exploration sampling’ algorithm is used to efficiently identify the call with the highest rate of engagement. Simulations show that adaptive sampling increased the posterior probability of the chosen arm being optimal from 86 to 93 percent and more than halved the posterior expected regret. The paper discusses a range of implementation aspects, including how to decide about research design parameters such as the number of experimental waves.
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The Effect of Bonuses on Teacher Retention and Student Learning in Rural Schools: A Story of Spillovers
We estimate the direct and indirect effects of recruitment bonuses paid to teachers working in rural schools in Peru on their retention and student learning. This is the first study to estimate the indirect effects of a bonus aimed at attracting teachers to disadvantaged schools. This is important for assessing whether the incentive has improved the distribution of teaching resources and for estimating the direct effect without bias. We exploit the exogenous variation produced in the size of the bonus by the rule used to classify rural schools, and allow ineligible schools to be affected if they have an eligible school nearby. We find the bonus produces positive direct effects on teacher retention but also a negative spillover on the probability of filling teacher vacancies in neighboring schools. This spillover indicates that the bonus is redistributing resources between equally disadvantaged schools. We also find that the bonus has no direct effects on student learning and produces a positive spillover on the scores of students in neighboring schools. We argue these results are due to the poor pedagogical skills of the teachers being mobilized by the scheme. A reasonable policy alternative is a scheme that targets talented teachers with larger bonuses.