Gianluca Antonecchia

I am a research fellow at the Department of Economics, Management and Statistics at University of Milan-Bicocca.

I am also affiliated to the IO group of the Department of Economics at KU Leuven.

My research field is Industrial Organization with spillovers on health, development, labor, innovation and strategy economics.

I received my PhD from the Tinbergen Institute - Erasmus School of Economics.

Click here for my CV .

Contact me at: gianluca.antonecchia[at]unimib.it or gianluca.antonecchia[at]kuleuven.be

Published research

Heterogeneous Expectations, Forecast Accuracy and Firms' Credit Demand

European Economic Review, Vol. 154: 104430, 2023

Firm heterogeneity in formulating expectations constitutes a source of friction for the credit market. An expected improvement of credit conditions in the future may slacken current credit demand. Using a panel of European firms in the period 2010-2019, I find that better expectations on future (six-month) access to credit reduce the probability of a firm to apply for bank loans by 3 percent. Results also suggest that access to credit expectations are adaptive. Although firms fail 43 percent of their access to credit forecasts, they adjust their expectations learning from previous forecast errors.

How Firms Compete When They Set Identical Prices: Nonprice Strategies in the Indian Biscuit Industry (with A. Bhaskarabhatla)

Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Vol. 34(4): 733-756, 2023

How do firms compete when all firms in an industry set identical prices? Using Nielsen data on India’s biscuit manufacturers, we document productivity-based competition on nonprice strategies under industry-wide uniform pricing. Products with one standard deviation higher quantity-based productivity contain, on average, 13 percent more quantity per pack for the same price. Productivity also positively correlates with promotions on pack size, availability, and variety. A higher price (per pack size) sensitivity in rural markets combined with industry-wide uniform pricing imposes a higher burden on rural consumers. Additional analyses show that firms can reduce this burden by selling different pack sizes in urban and rural areas.

Ongoing research

Bargaining Power and Quantity Discounts to Retailers: Evidence from India's Pharmaceutical Industry (with A. Bhaskarabhatla & E. Pennings) [submitted]

This paper develops a novel theory linking quantity discounts to bargaining power in scenarios where retailers, organized as a trade association, negotiate uniform wholesale prices with suppliers. Our theory predicts that suppliers offer greater quantity discounts in regional markets where they possess relatively less bargaining power, as a counterbalance to the higher national wholesale prices negotiated by the retailer trade association. We test these predictions using detailed product-level data from the Indian pharmaceutical industry, where significant geographic variations in quantity discounts are observed. Our findings provide empirical support for the proposed theory.

Pack Size Heterogeneity and Consumption Inequality: Evidence from India (with A. Bhaskarabhatla) [submitted]

We estimate consumption inequality in India using novel product-level data during 2014-2018. We show that consumption inequality is severely underestimated if differences in product pack size and quality are ignored. We show that low-socioeconomic status households consume relatively more product units but of smaller pack size compared to higher-status households, resulting in lower quantity consumed. We decompose consumption inequality into quantity effect (lower consumption of a product) and composition effect (a smaller set of products consumed). Surprisingly, the composition effect is significantly larger than the quantity effect, and accounts for the declining trend in consumption inequality in India.

Superstar Products and the Sources of Market Power [new draft coming soon]

The large price difference observed across highly substitutable drugs is often attributed to demand characteristics, i.e. consumers’ perceived quality of the product. I study the supply-side drivers of pharmaceutical prices using product-level data for narrowly-defined markets of the Indian pharmaceutical industry. Controlling for demand primitives (elasticity and appeal) and retail buyer power, I show that productivity is negatively associated with the wholesale price of a drug. This result is consistent with the selection on productivity mechanism and is confirmed by subsample analysis. I also show that the relative wholesale price of a drug proxies its relative producer markup. The sales of the largest firms are concentrated in a small number of superstar products that have higher markups and productivity, and contribute substantially to the industry aggregate markups and concentration.

Prices, Retail Markups and Market Shares in the Pharmaceutical Industry (with A. Bhaskarabhatla) [new draft coming soon]

We examine the relationship between prices and product market shares in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, using detailed data on product-level sales and prices. Despite the large number of competitors within the markets (active ingredient-dosage form), we observe a positive correlation between product price and market share. We divide the retail price into wholesale price and retail markup and identify their marginal effects on product market share. We find that elasticity of substitution across medicines with identical medical effect for the retailers is almost four times larger than that of the consumers, being the retailers more able to switch across medicines. We find that 77 percent of the market share variance can be attributed to the brand appeal of a drug, that is positively associated with its price but not with its productivity.

The Rise of Labor Outsourcing and Firm Performance (with J. De Loecker, T. Obermeier & J. Van Reenen) [in progress]

Patent Expirations and Product Scope Evolution in Pharmaceuticals (with A. Bhaskarabhatla, S. Ghai & E. Verhoogen) [in progress]

Agency Workers and Rent Sharing: Evidence from France (with H. Maghin & L. Treuren) [in progress]

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