Michele Fioretti

Assistant Professor
​Department of Economics
Sciences Po

email michele.fioretti@sciencespo.fr
cv pdf

Working Papers

Caring or Pretending to Care? Social Impact, Firms' Objectives and Welfare
R&R, Journal of Political Economy
Best Paper Award at EEA-ESEM 2018
[pdf] [+ abstract]

Abstract: Many 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.

Performance Pay in Insurance Markets: Evidence from Medicare
with Hongming Wang
Conditionally Accepted, Review of Economics and Statistics
Policy Research Award at INFER 2020
[pdf] [VoxEU] [+ abstract]

Abstract: Public 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.

Saving for a Dry Day: Coal, Dams and the Energy Transition
with Jorge Tamayo
[pdf] [+ abstract]

Abstract: Renewable generation creates a tradeoff between current and future energy production as generators produce energy by releasing previously stored resources. Studying the Colombian market, we find that diversified firms strategically substitute fossil fuels for hydropower before droughts. This substitution mitigates the surge in market prices due to the lower hydropower capacity available during dry periods. Diversification can increase prices, instead, if it results from mergers steepening a firm's residual demand. Thus, integrating production technologies within firms can smooth the clean-energy transition by offsetting higher prices during scarcity periods if the unaffected technologies help store renewables more than exercise market power.

Selfish Shareholders: Corporate Donations During COVID-19
with Victor Saint-Jean and Simon Smith
[arXiv] [+ abstract]

Abstract: During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicting incentives caused most shareholders to adverse corporate social responsibility (CSR) -measured by firms' charitable donations- since it would further burden firms' already strained finances. Those shareholders that favored donations, large individual investors, did so to bolster their own images as they are typically synonymous with the donating firms. Image gains do not pass through to institutional shareholders, who instead preferred to donate themselves rather than having the firms they invested in donate. Taken together, our results cast doubts on large corporations' willingness to demand costly CSR measures across firms in their portfolios.

Two-Sided Market Power in Firm-to-Firm Trade
with Vanessa Alviarez, Ken Kikkawa and Monica Morlacco
[pdf] [+ abstract]

Abstract: We provide a framework for analyzing buyer-supplier bargaining over the price of an imported good with two-sided market power and heterogeneity. Our main theoretical result is a price formula that tractably nests a wide range of configurations of market power and heterogeneity among importers and exporters in a unified way. We demonstrate that a shock to the exporter's costs can have a very different pass-through on import prices depending on the allocation of bargaining power and bilateral market shares. To estimate the model, we build a novel dataset merging transaction-level international trade data for the U.S. with balance sheet information on both the U.S. importers and foreign exporters. Our results shed light on two open questions on firms' participation in global value chains: the relationship between import and export concentration and markups; the role of firms in determining the tariff pass-through on import prices.
Recent pres.: 2021 NBER SI

Published & Forthcoming Papers

Dynamic Regret Avoidance
with Sasha Vostroknutov and Giorgio Coricelli
AEJ: Microeconomics, forthcoming
[ssrn] [gated] [+ abstract]

Abstract: In 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.

Suboptimal Dishonesty: Rationality in the Absence of Strategic Behavior in Honesty Experiments
with Sean Marden
The Journal of Neuroscience, 2015, 35(5):1817–1818
[pdf] [gated]