Upcoming Presentations

Abstract: This paper investigates colorism, racial discrimination based on skin color, in men’s football. Firstly, using machine learning algorithms, we extract players’ skin tones from online headshots to examine their impact on fan-based ratings and valuations. We find evidence of a skin tone penalty, where darker-skinned players face lower fan-driven market values and ratings. Secondly, using algorithm-based ratings and employing a Difference-in-Discontinuities design with geolocated penalty kicks data, we show that lighter-skinned players enjoy a premium higher by 1.25 standard deviations than their darker-skinned peers, conditional on scoring a penalty. Additionally, we find evidence that non-native players with dark skin face a double penalty. Leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, we highlight the role of fans’ stadium attendance in algorithm-based results. The findings underscore direct skin tone discrimination in football and highlight fans’ role in perpetuating algorithmic bias.

Abstract: We find evidence that patent grants influence the stock returns of firms that are connected through technological knowledge dependencies. Using the direction of patent citations between publicly listed companies, we construct a daily exposure of each firm to new patent grants to its knowledge upstream firms (neighborhood) weighted by how intensely they are cited by it. We find that a percent increase in the market value of patents granted to a firm’s neighborhood increases its ab- normal returns by about 0.5 basis points each day within three days of patent grant. These spillovers are about 20 percent in size relative to returns generated a firm’s own patents. Moreover, stock returns attributable a firm’s neighbors increase over the course the week of grant, whereas they fade out with respect to its own patent grants, suggesting a gradual diffusion of information in financial markets. We further show patents granted to product market rivals decrease, and patents granted to suppliers increase, stock returns of firms. However, accounting for them does not affect our estimates of financial spillovers attributable to techno- logical knowledge dependency. We test for robustness using alternative controls and measures of patenting, restricting analysis to firms operating across industries, using placebo weights for knowledge dependencies, and demonstrating that financial spillovers tend to be localized within a firm’s immediate connections.

Abstract: This paper makes use of the rapid surge of short-term rentals in Portugal to estimate its impact on local businesses. We create a continuous treatment variable, which is a measure of new short-term rentals registries divided by number of dwellings, at a parish level, and we use firm-level data to examine the effect on the evolution of the percentual change between 2016-2019 of certain outcome variables. We document that exposure to short-term rentals increases the probability of closure, especially for low performance firms. We estimate sizable increases in sales and external expenses, for both resident and tourist-oriented companies, while uncovering significant increases in number of employees, wages and liquidity for tourist-oriented, validated through a set of robustness checks. Higher treatment exposure is also linked to increases in probability of an entry firm being tourist-oriented, potentially leading to changes in urban business geography, and having larger turnover than closing firms.