Ongi Etorri!
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I work on energy, environmental and political economy issues using tools from empirical industrial organization.
I just completed my PhD in Economics at CEMFI.
I am a Fellow in the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law for the 2024-2025 academic year.
You can find my CV here.
Working Papers
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Delaying the Coal Twilight: Local Mines, Regulators, and the Energy Transition
- Job Market Paper
- Coal is the first source of electricity worldwide, yet it is also the most polluting.
Since 2010, the US has experienced a sharp reduction in natural gas prices, a close coal substitute.
However, coal power plants invested $29 billion in upgrades between 2008 and 2019.
This paper aims to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory facts through a novel mechanism: the protection of local coal mines by electricity regulators.
According to this mechanism, regulators from mining states encouraged coal plant upgrades that enabled the plants to keep procuring from the state's mines.
Coal plant upgrades often translated into higher electricity prices, harming consumer welfare.
Moreover, the upgrades extended the lifetime of the coal power plants, delaying their replacement and preventing substantial CO2 emission reductions.
This paper combines reduced-form and structural estimation methods to find that, absent the coal protection channel, total US coal plant capacity in 2030 would have been 7% lower.
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Ballot Measures, Political Advertising, and Contribution Caps
- with Cristian Navarro Serrano. Preliminary Draft
- Following the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, unlimited campaign spending has been permitted for all election types. As a result, there has been a notable increase in campaign contributions for ballot measures, which are a unique form of direct democracy. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of TV political campaigns on ballot measure outcomes. Using variation in exposure to TV advertising across media markets, our reduced form estimates suggest that a 1 standard deviation increase in the net number of ads of one campaign is associated with an increase of 2.13 to 2.46 p.p. in its net vote share. We define the main features of a structural model that incorporates equilibrium effects and strategic behavior of campaigns. Further work will focus in estimating this structural model to explore counterfactual scenarios with different contribution caps, and other related questions.
Work in Progress
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- Good and Bad Discretion in Procurement
with Juan-José Ganuza and Gerard Llobet.
- Optimal Regulation of User-Generated Content Digital Platforms.
Teaching
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Regulation and Competition Policy
- CEMFI graduate course.
Teaching assistant for Professor Gerard Llobet. Fall 2021, 2022.
Find teaching evaluations here and here.
Best teaching assistant award, 2022.
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Uncertainty and Information
- CEMFI graduate course.
Teaching assistant for Professor Guillermo Caruana. Winter 2021.
Find teaching evaluations here.
Policy Work and Others
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