Trading Off Stakeholder Interests: Evidence from Antitrust Investigations (with Jiaying Li and Paolo Volpin), 2024

Firms react to increased antitrust scrutiny in their industry by engaging in a brief but intense period of labor restructuring, while limiting the impact on shareholder payouts. The effects tend to be concentrated in firms that are less productive and closer to financial distress at the time of the shock.

Anticompetitive Trade Credit (with Giacomo Calzolari and Vincenzo Denicolo’), 2024, in progress

Widespread trade credit arrangements can have anticompetitive effects in the suppliers' product market.

Employment Protection and Organizational Structure (with Jiajun Tao and Francisco Urzua), 2024, in progress

Employment protection regulation affects corporate groups differently from stand-alone companies. We provide causal evidence for the longstanding claim that labor market frictions shape organizational structure, favoring the emergence of business groups.

Bypassing Labor Market Frictions in Bad Times: The Role of Internal Labor Markets (with Chiara Fumagalli, Francis Kramarz and Giovanni Pica), 2021

Group-affiliated firms rely on Internal Labor Markets when responding to adverse shocks, thus bypassing firing frictions. Hence, ILMs provide an insurance mechanism between firms in a group, and provide job stability to employees as a by-product.  

The Design of Syndicates in Venture Capital (joint with Josh Lerner and Lucy White), 2014

The process whereby a venture capital syndicate is formed is characterized by two-sided asymmetric information, as the profitability signals held by different VCs are non-verifiable and manipulable. We analyze the optimal design of cash-flow rights in VC syndicates, and show that the incentive costs of syndication vary with the VCs' expertise in evaluating entrepreneurial projects. The results have implications for how lead VCs should choose their syndication partners.