WORKING PAPERS
BANK MARKET POWER AND CREDIT ALLOCATION - 2026
With Rebecca De Simone and Priit Jeenas
[new version coming soon]
We examine how lender conduct shapes the incidence and welfare effects of financial taxes and subsidies. Exploiting Ecuador’s unanticipated 2014 loan tax and administrative lending data, we estimate and test a structural model nesting Bertrand-Nash competition, joint maximization, and partial cartels, identified using tax pass-throughs. We reject the standard Bertrand-Nash benchmark: banks substantially internalize rivals’ profits when setting prices. Imposing Bertrand-Nash pricing overstates the excess burden of taxation, mischaracterizes incidence, understates fiscal capacity, and overstates the effectiveness of credit subsidies. Findings suggest policymakers consider market structure in tax-and-subsidy strategies.
Conference: NBER Corporate Finance Spring 2024 Meeting
Video: World Bank/IFS/ODI Conference (20 min)
PUBLICATIONS
Firms in developing countries often face concentrated input markets and contracting frictions. This paper studies the efficiency of self-enforced relational agreements, a common solution to contracting frictions, when sellers have significant market power and contracts cannot be enforced through courts. To this end, I develop a dynamic contracting model with limited enforcement in which buyers can default on their trade-credit debt without legal penalties. The model is shown to be identified and is estimated using a new transaction-level dataset from the Ecuadorian manufacturing supply chain. My key empirical finding is that bilateral trade is inefficiently low in early periods of the relationship, but converges toward efficiency over time, despite sellers’ market power. Counterfactual simulations imply that both market power and enforcement contribute to inefficiencies in trade, as addressing either friction alone leads to welfare losses, whereas relaxing both frictions can lead to significant efficiency gains.
This paper assesses the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Mexican manufacturing plants’ output prices and markups. We distinguish between Mexican goods that are exported and those sold domestically, and decompose their prices separately into markups and marginal costs. We then analyze how these components were affected by the reductions in Mexican output tariffs, intermediate input tariffs, and U.S. tariffs on Mexican exports. We find that domestically sold products saw a decline in prices as Mexican plants faced more competition and gained access to cheaper inputs. By contrast, exported goods saw a slight increase in prices as plants increased their markups in response to a favorable competitive environment due to declines in U.S. tariffs.
We use new administrative data from Ecuador to study the welfare effects of the misallocation of procurement contracts caused by political connections. We show that firms that form links with the bureaucracy through their shareholders experience an increased probability of being awarded a government contract. We develop a novel sufficient statistic—the average gap in revenue productivity and capital share of revenue—to measure the efficiency effects, in terms of input utilization, of political connections. Our framework allows for heterogeneity in quality, productivity, and non-constant marginal costs. We estimate political connections create welfare losses ranging from 2 to 6% of the procurement budget.
Media Coverage: El Telégrafo
POLITICAL CONNECTIONS AND MISALLOCATION OF PROCUREMENT CONTRACTS - Journal of Development Economics (2024)
With Javier Brugués and Samuele Giambra
[Pre-print Version] [Published Version]
THE IMPACT OF NAFTA ON PRICES AND COMPETITION - Journal of International Economics (2025)
With Ken Kikkawa, Yuan Mei, and Pablo Robles
CONTRACTING FRICTIONS AND MARKET POWER IN SUPPLY CHAINS - American Economic Review (2026)
We study how bank competition affects commercial lending, credit allocation, and firm performance. Using evidence from Ecuador's commercial credit market and pass-through estimates from the 2014 SOLCA loan tax, we identify lending distortions due to supply-side bank market power and distinguish them from other sources of pricing power in credit markets. We find that 26% of observed loan markups are due to joint profit maximization and that moving to Bertrand-Nash competition would substantially reduce loan prices, increase loan use, and expand credit access. These distortions vary markedly across borrowers and are especially large for small and young firms and for new lending relationships. We combine this empirical evidence with a structural general equilibrium model bank competition in the lending market and firm dynamics to quantify how limited bank competition distorts credit allocation, firm-level outcomes, and aggregate allocative efficiency.
TAXATION WHEN MARKETS ARE NOT COMPETITIVE: EVIDENCE FROM A LOAN TAX - 2026 (R&R Journal of Political Economy)
With Rebecca De Simone
WORK IN PROGRESS
GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM EFFECTS OF QUALITY ASSURANCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION With Luis Armona, Rebecca De Simone, and Sebastian Otero
DELEGATED SCREENING: EVIDENCE FROM GOVERNMENT BACKED LOANS With Rebecca De Simone, Thi Mai Anh Nguyen, and Juan Sebastian Velez
COLLATERAL, ENFORCEMENT, AND CREDIT EXPANSION With Rebecca De Simone, Thi Mai Anh Nguyen, and Juan Sebastian Velez
BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATIONAL HIERARCHIES AND NEPOTISM With Juan Felipe Riaño and Cristhian Rosales




