Working Papers
Fewer Buyers, Higher Pay? Monopsony and Product Market Power in the U.S. Publishing Industry (JMP)
Abstract
In 2022, a U.S. federal court blocked the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, the first U.S. merger halted solely on the basis of harm to an input market. Standard monopsony analyses hold firms’ input valuations fixed, yet a merger that raises downstream pricing power raises the profits an input generates, and with it every firm’s willingness to pay. This paper quantifies both channels in a unified framework and applies it to the blocked merger. Using a new dataset linking retail book sales to the corresponding manuscript acquisitions, I first document that, after the most recent merger between large publishers, advances declined for authors with a previous bestseller but increased for debut and mid-list authors. Reduced competition for manuscripts alone cannot explain these changes. I then develop and estimate a structural model that links ascending-bid auctions for manuscripts to differentiated-product demand and multiproduct price competition in the retail book market. Simulating the blocked merger, consumer surplus falls by $19.9 million (−2.5%) while aggregate advances rise by $20.3 million (10.2%): advances fall for the manuscripts the merging publishers jointly contested but rise across the much larger remainder of the market, where heightened downstream profitability lifts every publisher’s bids. An upstream-only analysis of the same estimated model predicts a decline in author compensation, mis-signing the effect of a merger on authors.
Gender-Based Price Differences: The Case of Deodorants
Abstract
This article investigates the causes and consequences of gender-based price discrimination—the “pink tax.” Using data from the deodorant market, I document that female-oriented products are priced higher than male-oriented ones, and I estimate a differentiated-products demand-and-supply model under oligopoly to decompose this price gap. The results show that most of the disparity stems from differences in marginal costs. Counterfactual simulations indicate that enforcing gender price parity does not improve welfare for consumers of female-oriented goods as intended; instead, it leaves their surplus unchanged and leads to welfare gains for consumers of male-oriented goods.
Work in Progress
What Does Fuel-Price Stability Buy? Evidence from Mexico
Abstract
Governments spend enormous sums to shield consumers from fuel-price swings, yet whether this stabilization is worth its cost, and who it benefits, is largely unmeasured. I study Mexico’s waiver—a weekly formula that adjusts the gasoline excise so that roughly 90% of international price movements never reach the pump—using 2023 station-level retail and wholesale prices, the decree-set weekly subsidy, station sales, and household expenditure data. I first show the policy is a pure price-stabilization instrument: the excise is set to offset cost, so what stations and consumers pay stays nearly flat while the underlying cost swings by several pesos per litre, and the incidence falls between consumers and the treasury rather than on the supply chain. The subsidy cost about MXN$116 billion in 2023 (0.4% of GDP), and up to 1.3% in higher-oil years. Estimating a spatial model of gasoline demand, I find that withdrawing the waiver would impose a net efficiency cost an order of magnitude smaller than the transfer it rearranges. The decisive effect is distributional: because car ownership rises steeply with income, the top decile captures on the order of 25 times the subsidy received by the bottom, making a policy defended as consumer protection a transfer up the income distribution.
Splitting the Crowd: Network Effects and Welfare Implications of Platform Competition (with Regina Seibel)
Abstract
Estimates of network effects are central to platform antitrust, yet remain scarce. We study competition among game-streaming platforms—Twitch, Kick, and YouTube Gaming—using daily streamer-level data around the 2022 entry of Kick into a market long dominated by Twitch. Exploiting events in which popular streamers switch platforms, we first show that incumbents on the destination platform gain viewership when a large streamer joins—evidence of network effects beyond a standard taste for variety. We then estimate a flexible nested-logit demand model in which a streamer's value depends on how many others share the platform, separately identifying network effects from congestion, and find network effects that overcompensate congestion. Pairing the demand estimates with a supply model of streamers' platform choice, we evaluate in ongoing counterfactuals whether entry by a challenger such as Kick can discipline a dominant incumbent, and how platform competition affects welfare when network effects are strong.
Does Top-Level Diversity Trickle Down? Evidence from U.S. Literary Prizes (with Yakov Bart, Samsun Knight, Julianna Spahr and Stephanie Young)
Abstract
Does diversifying prize-winners diversify the market? This premise motivates many high-profile diversity initiatives in cultural industries, yet is largely untested. Using library-checkout data from the Seattle Public Library covering over 135,000 authors and a staggered difference-in-differences design with matched controls, we estimate the effect of U.S. literary prizes on readership across author race and ethnicity. Prizes raise demand for winners of all backgrounds, but the effect is over twice as large for minority authors (77–97 log points) as for white authors (35–36 log points). Spillovers to non-winning authors of the same race are highly heterogeneous: null or positive for most groups, but significantly negative for Black authors, consistent with demand-side “token consumption” and yielding null net effects on the readership of Black authors overall. Top-down diversity initiatives can thus promote individual winners while doing little to diversify cultural consumption more broadly.
Pre-PhD Publications
When Context Matters: Uneven Firms’ Innovation Persistence in Developing Countries. Evidence from Uruguay, submitted (with Carlos Bianchi)
Abstract
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.
Innovation, work organization and knowledge sharing in Uruguayan firms (2023), Technology Analysis & Strategic Management (with Carlos Bianchi)
Abstract
How work is organised is a critical component of firms’ learning process. Because of that, the relationship between firms’ work organisation and their innovative effort is endogenous in nature and, in turn, causal effects are hardly identifiable. This paper aims to contribute by analysing the effects of organisational work practices oriented toward knowledge sharing and innovative efforts in Uruguayan firms between 2009 and 2015. Our research design allows us to test both the endogenous relationship and the potential causal effects, using econometric panel data techniques and instrumental variables. The results corroborate the endogenous relationship between these variables. Moreover, a positive and significant effect of communication practices on the innovative effort is identified in low-tech manufacturing firms but not in high-tech firms. This result offers valuable implications for public policy and industrial practices in developing countries since it reflects the main features of an innovation pattern that mostly relies on modernisation strategies rather than on high-tech innovations based on R&D.
El Aprendizaje entre Pares y sus Efectos en el Desempeño de los Estudiantes (2022), Desarrollo y Sociedad
Abstract
Tutorías Entre Pares es un programa desarrollado para mejorar la inserción de las generaciones de ingreso a la educación universitaria. Controlando por características demográficas, académicas y de personalidad, a través de métodos de emparejamiento se busca identificar si el programa tiene efecto sobre distintas dimensiones de los estudiantes. Los resultados muestran que el programa reduce la probabilidad de deserción, siendo una dimensión sobre la cual es esperado que actúe. Por otro lado, se observan resultados positivos sobre dimensiones académicas, de forma que los que participan aprueban más cursos y con mejores calificaciones que estudiantes similares que no participaron. Según estos hallazgos, este programa, destinado a trabajar directamente sobre dimensiones sociales, genera efectos sobre la esfera académica de los participantes. Estos hallazgos podrían representar un punto de partida para la formulación de políticas educativas con objetivos de mejorar las trayectorias en la educación universitaria.
Dependency Change with Aging and Associated Factors in Uruguay: A Cohort Study (2021), Journal of Aging and Health (with Alejandra Marroig and Graciela Muniz-Terrera)
Abstract
Objectives: To assess the heterogeneity of transitions toward dependency in older adults and to explore the robustness of results to different operationalizations of dependency. Method: Using data from people aged 60 years and older from a national representative study in Uruguay (Encuesta Longitudinal de Protección Social, N = 5071), we fitted multinomial regressions adjusted by sociodemographic and health characteristics to model transitions into dependency and death. We used a harder operationalization with basic activities of daily living (Katz-dependency) and Comprehensive-dependency with basic, instrumental, and advanced activities. Results: Increasing age (RRR = 1.08, CI = [1.05; 1.12], p < .001) and having comorbidities (RRR = 2.16, CI = [1.31; 3.57], p = .003) increased the risk of transition from nondependent to dependent using Katz-dependency. Women with at least two chronic conditions have increased risk of Comprehensive-dependency (RRR = 1.79, CI = [1.15; 2.80], p = .010). Discussion: Inconsistencies in findings emerged when evaluating transitions into dependency with the different measures, which may have social care implications.