Welcome

I'm Daniel Fernandez

PhD in Economics | CEMFI (2026)
About Me

Daniel Fernandez

PhD in Economics (CEMFI, 2026)

I am an Applied Economist working on firms and their role in shaping labor and financial markets. I study how firm decision-makers interact with employees, business partners, and stakeholders.

My main fields of interest are Business Economics, Labor Economics, Industrial Organization, and Development Economics.

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Research

Job market papers

Overlapping ownership in vertical relations: From fostering to tunneling


The wage-amenities tradeoff: Do firms offset minimum wage increases by cutting job amenities?


Publications

Jobs' amenability is not enough

with Lucila Berniell

Working Papers

Separations revisited: Do layoffs or quits drive lower separation rates in high-quality firms?

with Cauê Dobbin and Tom Zohar

Dare to be different: Compensation schemes and strategic competition


Spatial distribution of registered economic activity in Buenos Aires

with Guillermo Alves, Lucila Berniell, Victoria Castillo, Dolores De la Mata, Federico Juncosa and Sebastián Rotondo

Work in Progress

Better cities or better jobs? Disentangling city from job amenities

with Jorge Martín

Draft soon

Workers sort across cities in search of better opportunities and quality of life. Numerous studies use worker flows to recover city amenities and understand migration patterns. However, city amenities are not the only thing that changes when workers migrate; their jobs change too. Estimates that rely on worker flows therefore often conflate city characteristics with the average job amenities available in that city. We use endogenous worker flows within cities to identify firm-level job amenities, and then exploit cross-city migration to separate work amenities from place amenities. The remaining challenge is to set a normalization that puts all firm-level job amenities on a common scale.

How collective bargaining shapes firm boundaries: Evidence from telemarketers in the Brazilian banking industry


Draft soon

Brazilian banks have long treated telemarketing as an ancillary activity, outsourcing telemarketers presumably to keep them outside the scope of banking collective bargaining agreements (CBAs). Both premises became contested over time, generating a wave of lawsuits. These lawsuits, in turn, reveal that banks assign contracted workers to tasks beyond the original agreement. For instance, more than 2,500 lawsuits involving a well-known bank in Brazil—where contracted telemarketers performed teller, administrative, and IT tasks—illustrate how far banks can push labor outsourcing beyond its contractual nature. I explore how banks resort to breaches in labor outsourcing contracts to escape from more stringent CBAs, and how they responded when the Labor Supreme Court ruled in favor of contracted workers. In this project, I combine employer-employee administrative records, CBAs, and unlawful outsourcing lawsuits in the banking industry, exploiting variation across municipalities in the three data sources.

Collaborators

Teaching

Grad

Undergrad

  • 2013
    Political Analysis

    Invited Instructor (Game Theory & Econometrics) | CABALLERO, Carmen

    UNCuyo | Mendoza, ARGENTINA
  • 2011
    Introduction to Political Science

    Bsc in Political Science and Public Administration | CUETO, Walter

    UNCuyo | Mendoza, ARGENTINA