Welcome.
I study how competition, technology, and regulation shape firms' social and environmental conduct, using methods from industrial organization and trade.
Working Papers
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From Proposal to Commitment: The Life Cycle of Climate Shareholder Activismwith Victor Saint-JeanWe study what determines the success of climate-related shareholder proposals using a novel dataset linking proposal texts with management opposition statements and institutional investors' disclosed voting rationales. Because success often occurs before the vote, when proposals are withdrawn following a firm commitment, we develop a cosine-similarity method to predict likely opposition arguments for the full proposal universe, including withdrawn proposals. Our central finding is that proposal success depends primarily on whether the proposal's demands align with what large institutional blockholders are likely to support. We show that proposals requesting real actions, such as adopting climate policies or setting GHG targets, are significantly more likely to be withdrawn when they overlap with large blockholders' private engagement agendas. Pure disclosure proposals face a different constraint: they are more likely to encounter opposition when they prescribe how information should be produced or reported. Overall, climate proposals succeed only when the largest investors are already pursuing the issue privately, or when they leave management substantial discretion, calling into question their role as a tool for shareholder democracy.
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NGO Activism: Exposure vs. Influencewith Victor Saint-Jean and Simon SmithResubmitted, Journal of Financial and Quantitative AnalysisThis paper studies how the timing of NGO activism shapes its effectiveness in influencing corporate behavior. Using data on 2,500 campaigns targeting U.S. firms, we show that campaigns timed at annual general meetings (AGMs) generate large visibility gains but little contemporaneous influence, while campaigns launched before the AGM significantly increase shareholder proposal success and improve firms' environmental and social performance. We develop a dynamic model in which NGOs trade off awareness building and credibility formation, generating a lifecycle in activism from visibility-seeking to influence-oriented engagement. Therefore, NGOs' objectives evolve endogenously to coordinate stakeholder pressure and shape corporate behavior.
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Getting There and Getting In: How Mobility and Sorting Keep Women out of Top Startup AcceleratorsStartup accelerators are a leading gateway to venture capital, but top programs often require founders to relocate to a venture hub. From a hand-collected census of U.S. accelerator startups (2008-2011) followed for five years, we estimate a two-sided matching model that separates two channels behind the gender funding gap, geographic mobility and sorting across accelerator tiers. Women raise about 60% less than men over five years; the gap concentrates among non-relocating women, is largest at active-childrearing ages, and vanishes for relocators, while the mobility cost is near zero for men. Removing mobility frictions raises women's match quality but not their tier; reaching the high-funding top tier also requires removing the sorting disadvantage that women face. The 2012 JOBS Act eased the legal barrier and capacity grew tenfold, yet the U.S. VC dollar gap still tripled (2011-2020): closing it needs mobility, sorting, and capacity together.
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Capacity, Technology Portfolios, and the Paradox of Concentrationwith Junnan He and Jorge TamayoDoes limiting the largest firm's capacity always lower prices? We model firms competing in supply schedules with multiple technologies, each defined by a constant marginal cost up to capacity. We show that capacity and technological efficiency coexist as distinct sources of market power, with opposite policy implications. When efficiency drives the market power of the largest firm, a small transfer of higher-cost capacity from rivals to the leader raises concentration yet lowers prices, contrary to standard antitrust intuition. Large transfers raise prices, tracing a U-shaped relation between prices and concentration. We prove existence and uniqueness of equilibrium, and extend the results to other oligopoly models. Evidence from Colombia's wholesale electricity market, where weather shocks shift hydropower capacity across technology-diversified firms, supports the pattern. Counterfactual transfers to the largest firm lower prices by up to 30% in the least concentrated markets. We draw implications for capacity caps, divestitures, and merger review.
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Two-Sided Market Power in Firm-to-Firm TradeR&R (3rd round), American Economic ReviewWe develop a quantitative theory of prices in firm-to-firm trade with bilateral negotiations and two-sided market power. Markups reflect oligopoly and oligopsony forces, with relative bargaining power as weight. Cost pass-through elasticities into import prices can be incomplete or complete, depending on the exporter's and importer's bargaining power and market shares. In U.S. import data, we find that U.S. importers have substantial market power and disproportionate leverage in price negotiations. The estimated model produces accurate predictions of the impact of Trump tariffs on pair-level prices. At the aggregate level, ignoring two-sided market power could exaggerate tariff pass-through by about 60%.
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Sovereign Hold-Up and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the North SeaContractual relationships between the state and private firms involving large irreversible investments are vulnerable to sovereign hold-up risk: anticipating that the state can unilaterally revise terms once capital is sunk, firms may underinvest. Causal evidence on this mechanism is scarce because sovereign commitment is typically bundled with broader institutional quality. We overcome this identification challenge by exploiting a natural experiment in the North Sea oil and gas industry. In 1985, a Norwegian Supreme Court ruling declared retroactive changes to petroleum licenses unconstitutional, while the UK retained the discretion to revise contracts. Using granular data on the universe of fields and firms from 1975 to 1995, we estimate the impact of this strengthening of sovereign commitment on the adoption of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), a major extraction technology requiring large irreversible investments. Firms exposed to the ruling sharply increased EOR adoption and productivity, gaining market share through aggressive portfolio expansion. We find that private firms with preexisting EOR expertise, rather than state-owned enterprises, drove this transformation, leveraging this expertise to diversify into riskier geologies and adopt complementary technologies. These findings establish sovereign commitment as a primary determinant of investment and technology adoption. By tying the state's hands, the ruling transformed promises into credible commitments, effectively functioning as an industrial policy that unlocked a trajectory of technological deepening. While such constitutional protections are critical for investment, a global survey of constitutions reveals that only 30.6% of countries prohibit retroactive legislation beyond criminal law.
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The Shared Costs of Pursuing Shareholder Valueswith Victor Saint-Jean and Simon SmithWe study how shareholder values shape firms' costly prosocial actions and who bears their costs. We develop a model in which some shareholders are publicly associated with a firm (e.g., founders or other prominent individual blockholders). When the firm takes a visible action under intense media scrutiny, these shareholders can plausibly claim credit and gain reputation, while diversified institutional investors cannot. The key empirical challenge is that influence is rarely observed: many consequential decisions are not subject to shareholder proposals or votes. We therefore use predetermined annual general meeting (AGM) timing combined with large, sudden crises, COVID-19 and the invasion of Ukraine, to generate quasi-experimental variation in attention and attribution, and to study highly visible, high-cost actions that were not legally required at onset. Firms with prominent individual blockholders are more likely to donate or exit when their AGM falls at crisis onset, while firms with large diversified institutional owners are less likely to do so. Consistent with our mechanism, online searches rise for prominent individuals after firm actions but not for institutions. Using an intent-to-treat triple-difference design on the 1,000 largest U.S.-listed firms, we find that exposed firms reduce investment, productivity, and profitability by 1-3% for up to two years, highlighting the shared costs of pursuing the values of a visible minority.
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Concentration and Markups in International TradeThis paper derives a closed-form expression linking aggregate markups on imported inputs to concentration in a model of firm-to-firm trade with two-sided market power. Our theory extends standard oligopoly insights in two dimensions. First, it reveals that markups increase with exporter concentration and decrease with importer concentration, reflecting the balance of oligopoly and oligopsony forces. Second, it adapts conventional market definitions to reflect rigid trading relationships, yielding new concentration measures that capture competition in firm-to-firm trade. Analysis of Colombian transaction-level import data shows these differences are key to understanding markup dynamics in international trade.
Publications
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The Environmental Costs of Sanctions: Flaring and Venting in Venezuelawith Alessandro Iaria and Kavanaugh FitzPatrickEnvironmental and Energy Policy and the Economy, forthcomingEconomic sanctions on oil-producing autocracies change not only the quantity of oil but also how it is produced. Combining field-level production data with satellite measurements of gas flaring and atmospheric methane across six Latin American countries from 2012 to 2024, we study the U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. Per-barrel gas flaring in Venezuela rose about two-and-a-half-fold even as production fell by two-thirds, a pattern no unsanctioned neighbor shows, so environmental damage under sanctions is about two and a half times what a proportional decline in output would predict. Three channels generate this gap: the exit of small, dirty fields (composition) is more than offset by surviving fields running their infrastructure past design capacity (strain) and cutting their operating budgets (maintenance). We identify strain from the response of satellite-measured methane to the world price of naphtha, the imported diluent Venezuela's extra-heavy crude requires, and maintenance from a November 2022 U.S. Treasury license that allowed only Chevron to resume operations at its Venezuelan fields. A similar pattern of rising per-barrel emissions despite falling output appears under the sanctions on Iran (after 2018).
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Performance Pay in Insurance Markets: Evidence from Medicarewith Hongming WangReview of Economics and Statistics, 2023, 105.5: 1128–1144Policy Research Award at INFER 2020 · VoxEUPublic procurement bodies increasingly resort to pay-for-performance contracts to promote efficient spending. We show that firm responses to pay-for-performance can widen the inequality in accessing social services. Focusing on the quality bonus payment initiative in Medicare Advantage, we find that higher quality-rated insurers responded to bonus payments by selecting healthier enrollees with premium differences across counties. Selection is profitable because the quality rating fails to adjust for differences in enrollee health. Selection inflated the bonus payments and shifted the supply of high-rated insurance to the healthiest counties, reducing access to lower-priced, higher-rated insurance in the riskiest counties.
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Caring or Pretending to Care? Social Impact, Firms' Objectives, and WelfareJournal of Political Economy, 2022, 130.11: 2898–2942Many firms claim that "social impact" influences their strategies. This paper develops a structural model that quantifies social impact as the sum of surpluses to a firm and its stakeholders. With data from a for-profit firm whose prosocial expenditures are measurable and salient to consumers, the analysis shows that the firm spends prosocially beyond profit maximization, thereby increasing welfare substantially. Incentivizing a standard profit-maximizing firm to behave similarly would require subsidies amounting to 58% of its prosocial expenditures because consumers' willingness to pay is relatively inelastic to prosocial expenses. Therefore, social impact resembles a self-imposed welfare-enhancing tax with limited pass-through.
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Dynamic Regret Avoidancewith Giorgio Coricelli and Sasha VostroknutovAEJ: Microeconomics, 2022, 14.1: 70–93In a stock market experiment we examine how regret avoidance influences the decision to sell an asset while its price changes over time. Participants know beforehand whether they will observe the future prices after they sell the asset or not. Without future prices participants are affected only by regret about previously observed high prices (past regret), but, when future prices are available, they also avoid regret about expected after-sale high prices (future regret). Moreover, as the relative sizes of past and future regret change, participants dynamically switch between them. This demonstrates how multiple reference points dynamically influence sales.
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Suboptimal Dishonesty: Rationality in the Absence of Strategic Behavior in Honesty Experimentswith Sean MardenThe Journal of Neuroscience, 2015, 35.5: 1817–1818
Teaching
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Applied Data Analysis for Public Policy
Sciences Po · Master in Public Affairs · material
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Economics Module 1 — Consumer Behavior & Firms (30667)
Bocconi · Undergraduate · Fall 2025 · syllabus · Blackboard
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Economics Module 1 — Microeconomics (30065)
Bocconi · Undergraduate · Fall 2025 · syllabus · Blackboard
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The Economics of Industry (EC427)
London School of Economics · MSc Economics · course guide
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Introduction to Econometrics (30284)
Bocconi · Undergraduate · syllabus · Blackboard
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Managerial Economics
Sciences Po · Master in International Business and Sustainability · syllabus
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Public Economics
Sciences Po · graduate
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Sustainable Businesses and Moral Markets
Sciences Po · graduate (Common Academic Curriculum) · syllabus
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Topics in Economics
Sciences Po · MSc Economics
"Manuscripts don't burn" — M. Bulgakov