Andrea Prat

About

Andrea Prat is the Richard Paul Richman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, Columbia University. He received his PhD in Economics from Stanford University in 1997 and subsequently taught at Tilburg University and the London School of Economics before joining Columbia in 2012. His research spans organizational economics and political economy. In organizational economics, his work employs theoretical modeling, field experiments, and data analysis to study organizational design, corporate leadership, employee motivation, and optimal disclosure. In political economy, he focuses on defining and measuring how economic interests such as the media industry, large firms, and wealthy individuals influence the democratic process. Professor Prat has published numerous articles in leading journals including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Economic Studies. He has served as Chairman and Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and chairs the organizing committee of the European Summer Symposium in Economic Theory (ESSET). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Research topics

• Business
• Industrial organization
• Economics
• Political Science
• Market economy
• International trade
• Management
• Marketing
• Microeconomics

Selected publications

• The Political Economy of the Mass Media

  Media studies. · 2025-01-01 · 81 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  We review the burgeoning political economy literature on the influence of mass media on politics and policy. This survey, which covers both theory and empirics, is organized along four main themes: transparency, capture, informative coverage,

  PublisherDOI

• Organizational Capital, Corporate Leadership, and Firm Dynamics

  Journal of Political Economy · 2022 · 40 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  We argue that economists have studied the role of management from three perspectives: contingency theory (CT), an organization-centric empirical approach (OC), and a leader-centric empirical approach (LC). To reconcile these three perspectives, we augment a standard dynamic firm model with organizational capital, an intangible, slow-moving, productive asset that can be produced only with the direct input of the firm’s leadership and that is subject to an agency problem. We characterize the stead…

  PublisherDOI

• Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News

  American Economic Review · 2024-03-28 · 33 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  To investigate general patterns in news information in the United States, we combine a protocol for identifying major political news stories, 11 monthly surveys with 15,000 participants, and a model of news discernment. When confronted with a true and a fake news story, 47 percent of subjects confidently choose the true story, 3 percent confidently choose the fake story, and the remaining half are uncertain. Socioeconomic differences are associated with large variations in the probability of sel…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Political Power and Market Power

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 31 citations

  DOI

• Political Power and Market Power

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-12-01 · 9 citations

  reportOpen access

  Brandeis (1914) hypothesized that firms with market power will also attempt to gain political power.To explore this hypothesis empirically, we combine data on mergers with data on lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions in the US from 1999 to 2017.We pursue two distinct empirical approaches: a panel event study and a differential exposure design.Both approaches indicate that mergers are followed by large and persistent increases in lobbying activity, both by individual firms and by indu…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Oriana Bandiera

  177 shared

• Raffaella Sadun

  Harvard University

  126 shared

• Stephen Hansen

  University College London

  81 shared

• Amil Dasgupta

  European Corporate Governance Institute

  35 shared

• Luigi Guiso

  Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance

  15 shared

• François Ortalo‐Magné

  15 shared

• Tommaso Valletti

  14 shared

• Christian Moser

  13 shared

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