Contact Information
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 872-225-0327
Education
Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, 2021 (expected)
MA, Economics, Universidad de San Andrés, 2013.
BA, Economics, Universidad de San Andrés, 2012.
Primary Fields of Specialization
Microeconomic Theory
Secondary Fields of Specialization
Law and Economics, Innovation
Curriculum Vitae
Job Market Paper
“The Timing of Complementary Innovations”
This paper studies the development of technologies that require complementary innovations. At each point in time, resources are allocated to research projects that are completed stochastically in the form of breakthroughs. I solve the problem of efficient dynamic allocation of resources by showing that, for complements, this problem is equivalent to an auxiliary static problem. In some cases, the solution involves developing the innovations in sequence. In others, it is optimal to develop multiple innovations simultaneously. I provide a simple condition that determines the efficient timing of development. Then, I compare the solution to a decentralized allocation that is the equilibrium outcome when a continuum of firms race to innovate. The decentralized allocation is efficient if the projects are symmetric or the stakes are sufficiently high, provided that the innovators are compensated for the increase in value of subsequent innovations.
Other Research Papers
“Liability Design with Information Acquisition” (with Bruno Strulovici)
How to guarantee that firms perform due diligence before launching potentially dangerous products? We study the design of liability rules when (i) limited liability prevents firms from internalizing the full damage they may cause, (ii) penalties are paid only if damage occurs, regardless of the product’s inherent riskiness, (iii) firms have private information about their products’ riskiness before performing due diligence. We show that (i) any liability mechanism can be implemented by a tariff that depends only on the evidence acquired by the firm if a damage occurs, not on any initial report by the firm about its private information, (ii) firms that assign a higher prior to product riskiness always perform more due diligence but less than is socially optimal, and (iii) under a simple and intuitive condition, any type-specific launch thresholds can be implemented by a monotonic tariff.
“Market-Based Mechanisms” (with Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey)
Decision makers frequently condition their actions on economic outcomes, e.g. asset prices, that they believe convey information about an unknown state. However the decision maker’s action, or expectations thereof, may also influence the outcome. In this paper we study the general problem of choosing decision rules mapping outcomes to actions in the presence of such feedback effects. We characterize the set of joint distributions of outcomes, actions, and states that can be implemented as the unique equilibrium by decision rules which satisfy a minimal notion of robustness to manipulation. Moreover, we show that all such equilibria are robust to model misspecification. This characterization of the feasible set greatly simplifies the problem of choosing decision rules. A simple graphical technique allows us to identify qualitative features of optimal policies. We illustrate the power of this approach with an application to corporate bailouts. The results are also useful for characterizing optimal decision rules when the requirement of unique implementation is relaxed.
“A Taxation Principle with Non-Contractible Events” (with Bruno Strulovici)
In some settings it is not possible to contract with an agent ex ante. For example, a judicial procedure starts only after a crime was committed and only if the criminal is apprehended. We study a principal-agent model with private information and moral hazard in which the intervention of the principal is only triggered by certain outcomes. We introduce a property of social choice functions, identifiability, and show that implementable social choice functions satisfying this property can be implemented by a tariff, i.e., transfers that depend only on the realized outcome, not on the type of the agent.
Work in Progress
“Delayed Disclosure” (with Ludvig Sinander)
“Optimal Publication Bias”
Teaching
References
Prof. Jeffrey Ely (Committee Chair)
Prof. Bruno Strulovici
Prof. Wojciech Olszewski