Research

Working Papers

Monopsony Power in the Publishing Industry

In 2022 the DOJ blocked a merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, two if the five largest publishers worldwide. This became the first merger blocked exclusively based on monopsony power, under the idea that these would significantly reduce compensation to best-seller authors, for which these firms usually compete. I propose a model to investigate this issue, with focus also on non-best-sller authors and consumers. First, I use the previous merger brtween Penguin and Random House to address potential changes generated by this type of mergers. I observe that after that, compensation decreases for best-sellers, however, compensation for debut authors increases. Also, I observe that in the merged firm there is a significant decrease in the number of published debuts, as well as an increase in those debut’s quality, which can respond to portfolio changes. To estimate the effects of the PRH-SS merger I build a structural model of publishing industry, where publishers acquire books’ rights from authors in ascending auctions, based on the expected value they create. Based on these acquistions, publishers then compete in prices downstream and consumers make purchases.

Gender-based Price Discrimination

This paper investigates gender-based price disparities in the deodorant market. First, I show that products targeted to women tend to have higher prices than similar products targeting men. Using a structural demand model, I quantify the extent to which price gaps arise from differences in marginal costs, portfolio composition, and consumer price sensitivity. I find that nearly all of the observed price gap is attributable to cost differences, not firms’ pricing strategies. Simulating a counterfactual policy mandating gender price parity, I show that such type of regulation can unintentionally reduce consumer welfare for women and increase profits for dominant firms. These results suggest that gender-parity policies targeting prices, absent cost considerations, may have unintended and uneven consequences across consumers and firms.

SSRN Slides

When Context Matters: Uneven Firms’ Innovation Persistence in Developing Countries. Evidence from Uruguay, submitted (with Carlos Bianchi).

A large body of literature has identified positive persistence effects of innovation in firms located in developed countries. These works have claimed that that there is a state dependence effect that explains firms’ innovation trajectories in a sort of self-efficient process. However, this is not the rule in developing economies. This article adds novel evidence to this topic by analysing innovation persistence in Uruguayan firms between 2007 and 2018. Using a panel data set from the Uruguayan Innovation Survey, we run parametric and nonparametric estimations of firms’ innovation persistence in manufacturing and service sectors. Our findings indicate that innovation is an uneven, even erratic, process. Contrary to most of the extant research on the topic, we find mostly negative persistence effects of outcome innovation (both product and process) in the short term and positive persistence effects of R&D and innovation activities based on the acquisition of external technology (input innovation) in the medium term. We discuss how firms and context characteristics explain heterogeneous and uneven firms’ innovative trajectories in developing countries, challenging the extended interpretation of innovation as a self-efficient process.

SSRN

Work in Progress

Competition in Live-Streaming Platforms (with Regina Seibel)

Effects of Prizes on Author Readership (with Yakov Bart, Samsun Knight, Julianna Spahr and Stephanie Young)

Pre-PhD Publications

Innovation, work organization and knowledge sharing in Uruguayan firms, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management (with Carlos Bianchi)

Dependency change with aging and associated factors in Uruguay: a cohort study, Journal of Aging and Health (with Alejandra Marroig and Graciela Muniz-Terra)

El aprendizaje entre pares y sus efectos en el desempeño de los estudiantes, Desarrollo y Sociedad