About
I am currently Wieler Family Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, MA, USA. My main field of study is empirical industrial organization. I earned my Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia in 2014. Before coming to Boston College, I was on the faculty at Penn State University.
Current Research
see research page for publications
Price Discrimination in International Airline Markets (September 2022)
accepted at Review of Economic Studies
(with Gaurab Aryal and Jonathan W. Williams)
Summary: We develop a model of inter-temporal and intra-temporal price discrimination by monopoly airlines to study the ability of different discriminatory pricing mechanisms to increase efficiency and the associated distributional implications. To estimate the model, we use unique data from international airline markets with flight-level variation in prices across time, cabins, and markets and information on passengers’ reasons for travel and time of purchase. We find that the current pricing practice yields approximately 77% of the first-best welfare. The source of this inefficiency arises primarily from private information about passenger valuations, not dynamic uncertainty about demand.
The Evolution of Market Power in the US Auto Industry (March 2023)
(with Paul Grieco and Ali Yurukoglu)
Revision requested from The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Summary: Markups in the U.S. automobile industry gradually decreased over the last 40 years, even though prices rose substantially. Consumer surplus rose dramatically mostly due to increases in production technology and product quality.
Inventory Management in Markets with Search Frictions (March 2023)
(with Fei Li, Can Tan, and Yiyi Zhou)
Revision requested at International Economic Review
Summary: Inventory management can explain price dispersion because intermediaries/retailers adjust prices to manage inventory. We propose an equilibrium search model and calibrate it to data from the used car industry. Price dispersion generated from inventory management represents roughly 5 to 45 percent of observed price dispersion. A half of a car dealer’s value at facilitating search/matching is due to inventory management.
slides
Conformant and Efficient Estimation of Discrete Choice Demand Models (June 2022)
(with Paul Grieco, Joris Pinkse, Stephan Sagl)
Summary: We propose a mixed-data likelihood estimator (MDLE) for a mixed logit demand system which makes use of product-level and consumer-level data while allowing for price endogeneity. The estimator is efficient compared to the GMM approach commonly used by applied researchers (e.g. Petrin, 2002; Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes, 2004). We show how to conduct inference on general functions of the model parameters, including elasticities. We benchmark our likelihood-based estimator to the GMM approach with a Monte Carlo exercise and find superior performance in finite samples.