Publications

• "Consumers' Costly Responses to Product-Harm Crises"  (joint with Helena Perrone), Management Science (2023), 69(5), 2547-3155 [journal version]

This paper exploits a major food safety crisis to estimate a full demand model for the unsafe product and its substitutes, recovering consumers' preference parameters for different product characteristics. Counterfactual exercises quantify the relevance of different mechanisms -changes in safety perceptions, idiosyncratic tastes, product characteristics, and prices- driving consumers' responses. We find that consumers' reaction is limited by their preferences for the product's observable and unobservable characteristics. Due to the costs associated with switching from the affected product, the decline in demand following a product-harm crisis tends to understate the true weight of such events in consumers' utility. We find that unobservable taste is a crucial driver of consumers' responses. Our counterfactual exercises illustrate that the demand would have declined further if consumers had had access to a closer substitute. For an accurate assessment of product-harm crises, managerial strategies should therefore account for how different demand drivers bind consumers' substitution patterns.

• "Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers" (joint with Ghazala Azmat), Journal of Political Economy (2017), 125(5), 1306-1355 [app] [Selected media coverage: La Vanguardia, VoxEU, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Nada es Gratis] [Cited in Scientific Background of Claudia Goldin's Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023]

This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike other high-skilled professions, the legal profession assesses performance using transparent measures that are widely used and comparable across firms: the number of hours billed to clients and the amount of new client revenue generated. We find clear evidence of a gender gap in annual performance with respect to both measures. Male lawyers bill ten percent more hours and bring in more than twice the new client revenue than do female lawyers. We demonstrate that the differential impact across genders in the presence of young children and differences in aspirations to become a law firm partner account for a large share of the difference in performance. We also show that accounting for performance has important consequences for gender gaps in lawyers' earnings and subsequent promotion. Whereas individual and firm characteristics explain up to 50 percent of the earnings gap, the inclusion of performance measures explains a substantial share of the remainder. Performance measures also explain a sizeable share of the gender gap in promotion.

• "Conditional Privacy Rights, Comment", Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (2017), 173(1), 132-137

As argued in Acquisti et al. (2016), the proliferation of databases containing consumer information has led to exponential growth of the literature on the economics of privacy. Mungan (2017) contributes to the literature on privacy by focusing on publishers' incentives to gather and disseminate individuals' information. More specifically, the paper studies the possibility of allowing individuals to prevent the dissemination of information by exercising conditional privacy rights in exchange of a fee. In this Comment, I provide what I think are the major contributions and limitations of the analysis in the paper. In particular, I point out crucial conditions that might make conditional privacy rights problematic.

• "On the justice of decision rules" (joint with Miguel A. Ballester and Jose Apesteguia), Review of Economic Studies (2011), 78(1), 1-16

Which decision rules are the most efficient? Which are the best in terms of maximin, or maximax? We study these questions for the case of a group of individuals faced with a choice from a set of alternatives. First, we show that the set of optimal decision rules is well-defined, particularly simple and well-known: the class of scoring rules. Second, we provide the optimal decision rules for the three different ideals of justice under consideration: utilitarianism (efficiency), maximin, and maximax. We show that plurality, arguably the most widely used voting system, is optimal in terms of maximax, while the best way to achieve maximin is by means of negative voting, and the optimal utilitarian decision rule depends on the culture of the society. We then provide the mapping between cultures and optimal decision rules.

• "Breaking the law when others do: A model of law enforcement with neighborhood externalities", European Economic Review (2010), 54(2), 163-180

A standard assumption in the economics of law enforcement is that the probability of a violator being punished depends only on the resources devoted to enforcement. However, it is often true that the productivity of enforcement resources decreases with the number of violators. In this paper, an individual who violates the law provides a positive externality for other offenders because the probability of being punished decreases with the number of individuals violating the law. This externality explains the existence of correlation between individuals' decisions to break a law. The model evaluates the implications when determining the socially optimal enforcement expenditure, focusing specifically on the case of neighborhood crime. In particular, using a parametrized functional form, I show that neighborhood externalities will enhance or impede enforcement, depending on the crime rate.