About Me
I am a PhD Student at the European University Institute. My interests focus on household finance, inequality, and labor economics. In my research, I am studying the heterogeneous worker-level effects of industrial policy through the impact of the European Cohesion Policy Program in Portuguese firms. Other ongoing projects focus on households’ exposure to climate risks and how they adjust to it. In particular, I am developing a life-cycle portfolio choice model with physical climate risk to analyze how climate change affects savings behavior, portfolio allocation, and homeownership decisions. I am lucky to be supervised by Prof. Alexander Ludwig and Prof. Matthew Mitchell. Previously, I worked at both the European Central Bank and the Swedish House of Finance.
I’m always interested in new projects and understanding what other colleagues are working on. If you’d like to get in touch with me, please email me at francisco.tavares [at] eui.eu.
News
- We will be presenting our project Who benefits from industrial policy? Evidence from firm investment grants at the Portuguese Economic Journal Conference, 3-5 July 2026.
- The 2025 report of Portugal, Balanço Social was presented on May 20th. Press coverage: ECO, Expresso, Público.
Work in Progress
Who benefits from industrial policy? Evidence from firm investment grants
with Manuel Rosa Cruz
This paper studies the distributional consequences of firm investment grants. We exploit Portugal’s PT2020 program, a major component of the European Union’s Cohesion Policy, which allocates investment support through competitive calls for applications. Using administrative data covering the universe of applicants, we compare funded firms with unsuccessful applicants within the same call and complement the analysis with local comparisons around the effective funding cutoff.
We find that investment grants generate substantial increases in capital accumulation, employment, value-added, and profitability. Despite these large firm-level gains, we find little evidence of changes in workforce composition. Instead, the gains generated are distributed across the existing workforce.ed by investment support are distributed unevenly. Profitability increases substantially, while wage gains are concentrated among incumbent workers employed in high-skill occupations. By contrast, workers employed in non-high-skill occupations experience little wage growth. Finally, larger grants generate additional increases in firm scale and profitability but no corresponding wage gains for incumbent workers. This contrast indicates that the distribution of gains within firms does not scale proportionally with the magnitude of investment support. Overall, our findings indicate that industrial policy generates substantial economic gains, but that these gains accrue disproportionately to firm owners and skilled workers.