Research

Board Connections and Competition in Airline Markets

I investigate the effects of board connections on coordination among U.S. legacy airlines. I focus on connections caused by airline directors’ appointments to the board of third, non-competing firms. These connections do not arise from changes to airlines’ boards, and are arguably unrelated to airlines’ current and future economic prospects. In my baseline specification, I find a reduction of 2.5% in offered seats when all legacy airlines in a market are board-connected. Consistent with an anti-competitive effect, board connections are associated with an average increase of 3.7% in ticket fares. I provide evidence on director networks enabling tacit coordination among competing firms, even when direct interlocks are not allowed.

Credit Conditions when Lenders are Commonly Owned (with Laura Grigolon and Emanuele Tarantino)

Revise and resubmit, Journal of the European Economic Association

We investigate how common ownership between lenders affects the terms of syndicated loans. We provide a novel view on the role of common ownership in mitigating information asymmetries on the quality of borrowers and the contractual distortions of lending conditions. We empirically show that high levels of common ownership lower the rates and the shares of the loans retained by the lead bank, and mitigate rationing at issuance. We use a novel exclusion restriction based on deposit multimarket contact to identify the effect of common ownership on loan pricing after accounting for its impact on lenders’ participation in the syndicate.

Early Life Conditions, Time Preferences, and Savings (with Effrosyni Adamopoulou and Eleftheria Triviza)

This study examines how early-life exposure to food scarcity influences individuals' long-term time preferences and savings behavior. To this end, we analyze hand-collected historical data on livestock availability during World War II at the provincial level, alongside detailed survey data on elicited time preferences and household savings. By leveraging differences across cohorts and provinces in a difference-indifferences framework, we find that individuals who experienced more severe scarcity during early childhood develop higher levels of patience later in life and tend to hold more (precautionary) savings, conditional on income. Our findings suggest that exposure to protein scarcity during the first years of life and in utero can instigate a lasting increase in prudent behavior in the form of a coping mechanism.

Work in Progress

Innovation Adoption: Quality Shock Effect on Mobile Internet Demand (with Helena Perrone and Eleftheria Triviza)