Curriculum Vitae

Committee: Kevin Staub, Susan J. Méndez, Anthony Scott (Monash)

Final dissertation: Personality Traits and Labour Market Participation – Grade: 110/110

Final grade: 110 cum laude

“When Female Doctors Fly In: Access to Female Physicians in Primary Care” Read paper

In many rural communities, a woman who wants to see a female doctor has to leave town. I study how this barrier shapes women’s primary care, using a program that periodically sends a visiting female general practitioner to rural Australian towns and linked administrative records covering every subsidised consultation, prescription, and test. Two designs answer two questions. Comparing the same woman’s encounters with the visiting female physician and with local male providers, genitourinary or hormone medications are between three and four times as common among her prescription days with the female physician, and cervical screening is more than ten times as common among her service days. Cardiovascular and mental-health prescribing do not differ, and encounters with other non-local male providers show no similar pattern. Around the program’s entry into a town, prescribing does not change on average, but women who come to use the service become more likely to receive gender-specific prescriptions each month without seeing a doctor more often. The pattern is consistent both with women being more comfortable raising hormonal and gynaecological concerns with a female doctor and with differences in practice style. The findings suggest that the gender composition of the local workforce, and not only its size, shapes which health needs are met.

“From Awareness to Action: Help-Seeking and Femicides after Gender-Based Violence Campaigns in Italy” (with Margherita Agnoletto). Working paper

Awareness campaigns are among the most widely deployed policy responses to gender-based violence, yet systematic evidence on their behavioural effects remains scarce. This paper examines whether variation in campaign intensity around the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (November 25) affects help-seeking behaviour and femicide rates in Italy. We exploit the unusually high salience of the 2023 campaign in a difference-in-differences design that compares outcomes before and after November 25 across years of varying intensity. Helpline calls to the national 1522 anti-violence line increase by approximately 160% in the weeks following the high-intensity campaign, with the effect concentrated among non-victim callers. Femicides decline by approximately 61% during high-intensity campaign months. Event-study specifications reveal no differential pre-trends, and placebo tests yield null effects for alternative treatment years, supporting a causal interpretation of the estimates. These findings suggest that awareness campaigns can be effective tools for gender-based violence prevention.

“When Dads Can’t Get on the Beers: The Positive Impact of COVID-19 on Parental Drinking Behaviour” (with Susan J. Méndez, Susan Sawyer & Julie Moschion). Working paper

We estimate the effect of COVID-19 restrictions on alcohol consumption among parents living in Victoria. We combine detailed drinking information from the Victorian Adolescent Health Cohort Study, quasi-random variation in survey timing around Victoria’s first lockdown in March 2020, and a difference-in-differences design. We find that heavy drinking among fathers falls substantially: high-risk drinking declines by 26%, binge drinking drops by 28%, and peak single-occasion consumption decreases by approximately four standard drinks. Effects are entirely absent among mothers, concentrated among fathers of younger children, and grow larger under the second, longer lockdown. Descriptive evidence points to weekend drinking as the primary margin of adjustment, consistent with the removal of social occasions rather than financial hardship as the operative mechanism. These findings suggest that the structure of social opportunities shapes household drinking behaviour, and that policies intended to reshape daily routines can generate substantial reductions in alcohol consumption even when not explicitly designed for this target.

2026: Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). Upcoming: Paris Nanterre University; Centre for Health Economics (CHE), University of York; IE Business School, Madrid; University of Lucerne; University of Lausanne; University of Barcelona.

2024: Monash Centre for Health Economics

2023: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

* Upcoming