About

Luca David Opromolla is the Owens Professor of International Economics at Poole College of Management. He brings a discipline in theoretical and applied contributions to the fields of international trade, migration, labor economics, industrial organization, and public economics. His research focuses on topics at the intersection of international trade, labor, and industrial organization, including firm dynamics, the size distribution of firms, firms' decisions to export or open a plant abroad, trade costs, the role of managers in international activities, transfer of export knowledge, internal organization of firms, and the effects of reductions in migration and trade costs. Opromolla studied economics at Bocconi University, earning a Bachelor of Arts, and completed his Master of Arts and PhD in economics at New York University. He emphasizes the integration of research, teaching, and policy, and highlights the collaborative environment at NC State, including the presence of serious researchers and partnerships with institutions like the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Research topics

• Economics
• Political Science
• Macroeconomics
• Business
• International trade
• Social psychology
• Market economy
• Public economics
• Industrial organization
• Psychology
• International economics
• Accounting
• Monetary economics
• Finance
• Microeconomics
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• Labor Supply Shocks and Capital Accumulation: The Short and Long Run Effects of the Refugee Crisis in Europe

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-01-01 · 8 citations

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Labor Supply Shocks and Capital Accumulation: The Short and Long Run Effects of the Refugee Crisis in Europe

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Labor Supply Shocks and Capital Accumulation: The Short and Long Run Effects of the Refugee Crisis in Europe

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Labor Supply Shocks and Capital Accumulation: The Short- and Long-Run Effects of the Refugee Crisis in Europe

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2023-05-01 · 6 citations

  article

  European countries experienced a large increase in labor supply due to the influx of Ukrainian refugees after the 2022 Russia invasion of Ukraine. We study its dynamic effects in a spatial model with forward-looking households of different skills, trade, and endogenous capital accumulation. We find that real GDP increases in Europe in the long term, with large distributional effects across countries and skill groups. In the short run, an increase in the supply of labor strains the use of capital structures that takes time to build. Over time, countries that build capital structures increase output, resulting in potential long-run benefits.

  PublisherDOI

• The Value of Managers’ Export Experience: Lessons from the Angolan Civil War

  The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2022-11-23 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract We investigate how managers help firms grow by entering a new export market. We conduct an event study on the decision to export to Angola using data on Portuguese firms and workers. We evaluate the impact of the presence of managers with experience in exporting to the Angolan market on a firm’s entry success in the aftermath of an exogenous shock: the sudden end of the Angolan civil war. We show that the presence of managers doubles the probability of a firm entering the market. We do not find any significant impact on the intensive margin of exports.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication data for: The Value of Managers' Export Experience: Lessons from the Angolan Civil War

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-09-29

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  These are the codes that replicate the results of the paper "The Value of Managers' Export Experience: Lessons from the Angolan Civil War"

  PublisherDOI

• Can optimism solve the entrepreneurial earnings puzzle?*

  Scandinavian Journal of Economics · 2022-03-05 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract In this paper, we apply a general equilibrium occupational choice model to the study of the impact of optimism on the earnings of entrepreneurs and workers. We extend the work of Lucas (1978 Bell Journal of Economics 9 , 508–523) by assuming a fraction of individuals are optimistic about their ability as entrepreneurs. The model shows that optimism leads to a misallocation of talent and inputs, which raises input prices and lowers output. The model is calibrated to match salient features of the UK economy and the British Household Panel Survey. The calibration shows that optimism can account for more than half of the size of the entrepreneurial earnings puzzle in the UK.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Goods and Factor Market Integration: A Quantitative Assessment of the EU Enlargement

  Journal of Political Economy · 2021 · 126 citations

  • Economics
  • International economics
  • International trade

  We build a multicountry dynamic general equilibrium model to study the economic effects of the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. In our model, trade is costly and households of different skills and nationalities face costly forward-looking migration decisions. We exploit the timing of migration policy changes to identify the changes in migration costs. We find that the changes in migration and trade policy resulted in aggregate welfare gains but with heterogeneous effects across skill groups. We study the interaction between trade and migration policies and highlight the importance of trade for quantifying the welfare and migration effects of labor market integration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dream jobs

  London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) · 2020-07-01

  other

  Understanding why certain jobs are ‘better’ than others and what implications they have for a worker’s career is clearly an important but still relatively unexplored question. We provide both a theoretical framework and a number of empirical results that help distinguishing ‘good’ from ‘bad’ jobs in terms of their impact on a worker’s lifetime wage income profile through wage jumps occurring upon changing job (‘static effects’) or through increases in the wage growth rate (‘dynamic effects’). We find that the distinction between internationally active firms and domestic firms is a meaningful empirical dividing line between employers providing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs. First, in internationally active firms the experience-wage profile is much steeper than in domestic firms, especially for managers as opposed to blue-collar workers. Second, the higher lifetime wage income for managers in internationally active firms relies on the stronger accumulation of experience that these firms allow for and on the (almost) perfect portability of the accumulated dynamic wage gains to other firms. Static effects are instead much more important for blue-collar workers. Finally, the distinction between internationally active and domestic firms is relevant also at a more aggregate level to explain cross-sectional differences in wages among workers and spatial differences in average wages across regions within a country.

• Dream Jobs

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Giordano Mion

  99 shared

• Lorenzo Caliendo

  52 shared

• Esteban Rossi‐Hansberg

  University of Chicago

  42 shared

• Alfonso Irarrazabal

  BI Norwegian Business School

  35 shared

• Andreas Moxnes

  University of Oslo

  34 shared

• Alessandro Sforza

  24 shared

• Filomena Garcia

  14 shared

• Pedro S. Martins

  14 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2010

• M.A., Economics

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2006

• B.A., Economics

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  2004

Awards & honors

• Ostrom Workshop Fellow