I am an assistant professor at Departement of Economics and Business at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. Research Interests
Publications
We
use data from a Brazilian social program to investigate the existence
of gender bias in intrahousehold allocation of resources. The program
was designed to make monetary transfers directly to mothers and pregnant
women in the poorest households of Brazil. Bureaucratic mistakes,
beyond the control of the applicants, have accidentally excluded many
households who actually applied and were accepted to the program. These
unintentional exclusions formed a control group in the molds of random
experiments. This is used here to identify the impact of an exogenous
variation in female nonlabor income on household decisions. Our results
do not support the existence of gender-specifi
c effects on household
decisions.
Working Papers
Studies
of competition when information on actual firm costs is unavailable
require consistent estimates of long run demand price-elasticities. When
consumers stockpile, traditional static discrete-choice models
overestimate long-term price responses. In this paper, we develop a
dynamic model of demand with inventories and estimate the structural
parameters fully accounting for consumers' unobservable heterogeneity,
but without having to solve the dynamic programming. We find a
significant quantitative difference between the price-elasticities
yielded by the static and inventory model, pointing to the risks of
making wrong policy recommendations based on short run measures.
Recent literature finds evidence of price decreases during demand peaks. This paper argues that the price decrease is an artefact of ignoring product differentiation. We develop a simple individual demand model which shows that at periods of exogenous high demand, consumers migrate towards cheaper lower quality products, pushing the average category price down. We test model implications and estimate structural demand using a comprehensive individual level database on ice-cream purchases, which has a seasonal peak during the summer.
Price dispersion is prevalent in the French market, even after controlling for observable and unobservable store and market characteristics. Reduced-form test show that search costs explain, at least partially, the observed price variation. We then develop a model of individual purchase behaviour with search costs and structurally estimate the search cost distribution. Results show that search costs are high and that consumers search at most 3 times before purchasing a product
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