Pello Aspuru

I am an Economist working on energy, environmental and political economy issues using the empirical industrial organization toolkit. I am a Fellow in the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law for the 2024-2025 academic year. I will then join the Department of Economics at the University of Vienna as an Assistant Professor (non-tenure track). You can find my CV here.

Delaying the Coal Twilight: Local Mines, Regulators, and the Energy Transition: Best paper in regulatory economics, International Industrial Organization Conference 2025.

Draft | Abstract | Code

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.

Ballot Measures, Political Advertising, and Contribution Caps: with Cristian Navarro Serrano.
Good and Bad Discretion in Procurement: with Juan-José Ganuza and Gerard Llobet.
Optimal Regulation of User-Generated Content Digital Platforms: CEMFI Master Thesis

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.
Uncertainty and Information: CEMFI graduate course.
Teaching assistant for Professor Guillermo Caruana. Winter 2021.
Find teaching evaluations here.

Book chapter Contratación pública en Espańa. Los beneficios y los costes de reducir la discrecionalidad de los centros de contratación.
With Juan-José Ganuza and Gerard Llobet,
in Reformas para impulsar la competencia en España, FUNCAS 2023.
Press articles in Basque.

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PELLO ASPURU