Nicolas MARTINEZ FRANCO will defend his thesis on Tuesday, July 09 at 3:30 pm, (Auditorium 6 & Online, building TSE)
Title: "Essays in Empirical Industrial Organisation"
Supervisors: Isis Durrmeyer and Bruno Jullien
To attend the conference, please contact the secretariat Christelle Fotso Tatchum
Memberships are:
- Isis DURRMEYER : Professor in Economics, TSE - University of Toulouse Capitole Supervisor
- Bruno Jullien: CNRS - TSE Senior Researcher, Co-supervisor
- Christian BONTEMPS : Professor in Economics, ENAC/TSE-R Examinateur
- Panle Jia BARWICK : Associate Professor in Economics, Cornell University Rapporteure
- Victor AGUIRREGABIRIA : Professor in Economics, University of Toronto Rapporteur
- Philipp SCHMIDT-DENGLER : Professor in Economics, University of Vienna Examinateur
Abstract
The first two chapters of this thesis focus on understanding the impact of regulations and market structure for new transportation services and on finding which instruments are more efficient at improving urban traffic conditions. Finally, the third chapter studies the role of market structure on product offerings in the context of mobile telecommunications.
The first chapter the effect of spatial competition and imposed capacity constraints on welfare in transportation markets. Several transportation services require centralized actions from operators who choose the numbers of vehicles available in each. These decisions affect service availability and have an ambiguous impact on quality (waiting times, congestion levels, etc.). Moreover, regulators impose capacity constraints limiting the available supply. Such regulation increases the opportunity cost of allocation decisions and provides incentives to operators to either oversupply high-revenue locations or spatially differentiate by serving different low-demand markets.
I build a unique dataset covering the full market for shared electric scooters in Kansas City (US). I analyze the market using a dynamic spatial structural model incorporating the role of capacity constraints, economies of density, and dynamic externalities across locations on firms’ decisions. Counterfactual simulations show that by internalizing the trade-off between business stealing and spatial differentiation, a monopolist would improve welfare. Imposed citywide capacity constraints have a regressive nature, causing distributional concerns between high and low-income areas.
In the second chapter, joint work with Isis Durrmeyer, we develop a structural model representing equilibrium traffic conditions in a metropolitan area, with several dimensions of heterogeneity at the individual and geographical levels. The first part of the model represents the choice of a transportation mode and a departure time by individuals. The second part of the model represents the road congestion technologies, which describes how driving speeds react to changes in the number of individuals using cars and how many kilometers they drive.
We apply our model of transportation decisions and congestion to data from the Paris metropolitan area (Île-de-France region). In the main analysis, we compare the effects of three simple policies: driving restrictions, fixed tolls, and variable tolls. We find that all the regulations are costly for individuals, as speed gains cannot compensate for the losses from the constraints imposed by the policies. Under moderate stringency levels, both tolls improve aggregate welfare if their revenues are redistributed.
Finally, in the third paper, joint work with Oscar Jara, we study the interaction between market structure and technological progress and their impact on the evolution of product offerings within the mobile telecommunications sector. Using a unique dataset for the Peruvian mobile telecommunications sector, we analyze the role of the introduction of 4G connectivity, which increases demand for data, and how it interacts with a change in market structure that doubled the number of competing firms in the country. To disentangle these different effects, we build and estimate a structural model that incorporates discrete choice demand and considers two dimensions of the firms’ decisions: the choice of the characteristics of the plans offered and their respective prices.
