Florian Blum

I am an Economics PhD Candidate at the London School of Economics. I am also affiliated with the Economic Organisation and Public Policy Programme at STICERD.
Primary Fields of Research:
Development Economics

Secondary Field of Research:
Public Economics, Organizational Economics

I am on the 2016/17 academic job market and will be available for interviews at the SAEe in Bilbao, the RES PhD Meetings in London, and the AEA/ASSA Annual Meeting in Chicago.







Contact Details:
Department of Economics
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London, WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom


Tel: +44 (0)79 79 048 969

Twitter: @florian_blm

Download my CV here.





Job Market Paper
It is often argued that price-caps – a ceiling on prices charged by monopolistic suppliers - are necessary to redistribute surplus and make essential goods and services affordable. I explore whether price-caps lead to welfare improvements through a field experiment in which I randomize whether public livestock extension agents are subject to a price-cap or not. This intervention has three effects. First, conditional on being served, the treatment increases the consumer surplus available to recipients: the price-cap reduces average prices by 17% and the within-agent standard deviation of prices by 42%. Second, the intervention increases the affordability of extension services: the price-cap increases the share of previously unserved and needy customers in the beneficiary pool by 15% and 9%, respectively. Third, the price-cap reduces the geographic coverage of services by decreasing the likelihood that agents will serve remote villages by 25%. This suggests that price-cap regulation creates a tension between making services affordable and providing incentives for agents to serve remote recipients. In light of this trade-off, I show that the marginal welfare effect of reducing discretion over prices can be expressed as a function of two sufficient statistics: the elasticity of the proportion of served villages in a service area with respect to the price-cap and the price elasticity of demand. Calculating the welfare effects, I find that any reduction of agents’ discretion reduces social welfare.

 


Working Papers
Food for Thought: Nutrition and Agricultural Productivity
Research Question: How does a shock to agricultural productivity affect food consumption choices?

Work in Progress
Behavioral Responses to Inheritance Taxation
Research Question: How do bequests respond to changes in the marginal inheritance tax rate?

Other Writings:
with Rohini Pande

with Michel Azulai, Oriana Bandiera, Henrik Kleven, Eliana La Ferrara, Gerard Padro and Catalina Michelle Tejada

with Rohini Pande