Research

Despite my transition to industry, I continue to pursue independent research, leveraging my expertise to address complex economic questions. My research interests generally revolve around topics in empirical industrial organisation (IO), spatial economics, transportation economics, and computational economics.

Ongoing Research

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

    Status: Working Paper

    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 When Units Are Substitutes: Evidence from Place-Based Policies (joint work with Guillermo Alves and Sebastian Fleitas)

    Status: Submitted

    Comparing housing prices across policy borders is a common method for evaluating place-based interventions. However,re-sorting can alter prices in control areas, violating SUTVA. We analyze the difference-in-differences estimator in this setting and derive a sufficient statistics formula showing that bias increases with neighborhood substitutability and inelastic housing supply. Studying a housing tax break in Uruguay, we find that border estimates maximize substitutability and bias, failing to reject zero incidence. A structural model accounting for differential substitutability estimates an incidence of 80%. Common reduced-form alternatives, such as the ring and aggregation approaches, substantially reduce but do not eliminate bias.

  • Demand for Certainty in Transportation Markets

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

  • The Value of Information: Evidence from the Airline Industry (joint work with Domenico Fabrizi, Daniel Fry, Adam Thorsteinson, and Jason Wong)