Research

My research interests are in empirical industrial organisation (IO), spatial economics, transportation economics, and computational economics.

Current Research

  • Value of Flexibility: Evidence from Trains (Job Market Paper)

    Status: Under Confidentiality Review at TC-0

    The use of dynamic pricing tools has expanded significantly over the past two decades, accompanied by a growing emphasis on offering consumers the flexibility to cancel previously purchased items. This paper leverages a comprehensive dataset comprising all sales and cancellations from a major European passenger rail company to empirically quantify the effects of cancellation options on dynamic ticket pricing, consumer welfare, and firm revenue. First, I show that the overall effect of offering this flexibility is theoretically ambiguous, as it involves both higher ticket quality and lower opportunity costs. I therefore develop and estimate a structural dynamic pricing model and conduct counterfactual simulations to explore the overall effect as well as the relative importance of the ticket quality and opportunity cost channels. My results show that removing the flexibility to cancel decreases on average prices by 1.9%, consumer welfare by 4.5%, and firm revenue by 5.7%, suggesting that both consumers and firms benefit from allowing cancellations. In my particular setting, I find a negligible impact of the opportunity cost channel, thus indicating that observed changes are fully attributable to the higher ticket quality channel. Larger changes in opportunity costs would therefore amplify the losses from restricting cancellations.

  • Difference-in-Differences in Equilibrium: Evidence from Placed-Based Policies (joint work with Guillermo Alves and Sebastian Fleitas)

    Status: Submitted

    Violations of the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA) pose a common challenge to identifying equilibrium effects of policies. We show that the difference-in-differences estimator can be decomposed into autarky, re-sorting, and contamination effects, and we provide a formula for calculating contamination using supply and demand partial derivatives. To illustrate, we estimate a structural demand and supply model to analyze a housing tax break in Uruguay. Our findings show that SUTVA violations account for 25% of the effect on subsidized areas, significantly underestimating the policy`s incidence.

  • Demand for Certainty in Transportation Markets

  • Pass-Through Rates in Networks: An Application to Air Passenger Taxes (joint work with Filippo Biondi)