About

David Argente is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Yale School of Management. His research interests include applied macroeconomics, macro development, innovation, and monetary economics. His recent work centers around the use of payment methods in developing countries. Prior to joining Yale, Professor Argente was a Visiting Scholar at the Minneapolis Fed, an Assistant Professor at Penn State University, and a Kenen Fellow at the International Economics Section of Princeton University's Economics Department. He has also worked in the Latin America Region of the World Bank and at the Bank of Mexico. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2018.

Research topics

• Mathematics
• Statistics
• Computer Science
• Economics
• Econometrics
• Environmental health
• Industrial organization
• Macroeconomics
• Process management
• Demographic economics
• Business
• Geography
• Marketing
• Labour economics
• Internal medicine
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Inferring Prices from Quantities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inferring Prices from Quantities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Inferring Prices from Quantities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cross-Border Product Adoption: Individual Imports, Migrant Networks, and Domestic Retailers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Do Entrants Build Market Share? The Role of Demand Frictions

  American Economic Review Insights · 2025-05-29 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We construct a new dataset to show that successful entrants in the consumer food sector build market share by adding new customers. Entrants reach new customers by entering more geographical markets, placing their product in more stores in these markets, and, for a positively selected subset of firms, advertising directly to customers. These activities are costly and are associated with persistent increases in quantities, but there are no differences in markups between new and mature markets. This confirms a central role for marketing and advertising in overcoming demand-side frictions that slow firm growth. (JEL D24, D25, L11, L25, L81, M13, M37)

  PublisherDOI

• Code for: How Do Entrants Build Market Share? The Role of Demand Frictions

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2025-01-01

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We construct a new data set to show that successful entrants in the consumer food sector build market share by adding new customers. Entrants reach new customers by entering more geographical markets, placing their product in more stores in these markets, and for a positively selected subset of firms, by advertising direct to customers. These activities are costly and are associated with persistent increases in quantities, but there are no differences in markups between new and mature markets. This confirms a central role for marketing and advertising in overcoming demand-side frictions that slow firm growth.

  PublisherDOI

• Scalable Expertise: How Standardization Drives Scale and Scope

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Drivers of Digital Payment Adoption: Lessons from Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Consumer Surplus of Alternative Payment Methods

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2024-12-02 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract This paper estimates the consumer surplus from using alternative payment methods. We use evidence from Uber rides in Mexico, where riders have the option to use cash or cards to pay for rides. We design and conduct three large-scale field experiments, which involved approximately 400,000 riders. We also build a structural model which, disciplined by our new experimental data, allows us to estimate the loss of private benefits for riders when a ban on cash payments is implemented. We find that Uber riders who use cash as means of payment either sometimes or exclusively suffer an average loss of approximately 40–50% of their total trip expenditures paid in cash before the ban. The magnitude of these estimates reflects the intensity with which cash is used in the application, the shape of the demand curve for Uber rides, and the imperfect substitutability across means of payments. Welfare losses fall mostly on the least-advantaged households, who rely more heavily on the cash payment option.

  PublisherDOI

• Are Cryptocurrencies Currencies? Bitcoin as Legal Tender in El Salvador

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2023-07-13

  articleOpen access

  Supplementary Materials for: Are Cryptocurrencies Currencies? Bitcoin as Legal Tender in El Salvador

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Fernando Álvarez

  University of Chicago

  24 shared

• Munseob Lee

  University of California, San Diego

  17 shared

• Chang‐Tai Hsieh

  13 shared

• Sara Moreira

  11 shared

• Francesco Lippi

  Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli

  7 shared

• Diana Van Patten

  Yale University

  5 shared

• Chen Yeh

  Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

  5 shared

• Salomé Baslandze

  Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Kenen Fellow at the International Economics Section of Princ…