About

I hold the Oliver E. and Dolores Williamson Chair in the Economics of Organization and I am a Professor in the Business and Public Policy Group at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. I am also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the IOG group at the Becker Friedman Institute and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Fellow in the CESifo Research Network, and Co-Director of the Clausen Center for International Business & Policy. My research covers International Trade and Political Economy, including the link between skill distribution and comparative advantage, firms' lobbying, the role of lobbyists, and corporate philanthropy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Biology
• Ecology
• Political economy
• Accounting
• Natural resource economics
• Market economy
• Public economics
• Public relations
• International trade
• Geography
• Law

Selected publications

• Investing in Influence: Investors, portfolio firms, and political giving

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-09-29

  datasetOpen access

  This package contains the replication file, which includes data sets obtained from public databases, for the paper titled "Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving." Additionally, we provide information on other purchasable databases necessary for replicating the results of this study. The subfolder "Part1_DataCleaning" contains the codes and public data sets required to construct the data sets that are needed for the empirical analysis. The subsequent subfolder, "Part2_DataAnalysis," includes the codes used to generate the empirical results presented in the paper. A readme file is included to provide further details, along with comments within the codes and various folders for enhanced clarity. We also include the list of data sets that need to be purchased in order to be able to run the codes in the subfolder "Part1_DataCleaning". Most of the codes were executed using SAS, Stata, WRDS SAS Studio, and Python. Due to the computational complexity involved and the large size of data sets utilised in the study, the majority of the codes were executed on servers equipped with at least 512 GB of RAM and at least 1.5 terabytes of free space.

  PublisherDOI

• Investing in Influence: Investors, portfolio firms, and political giving

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-09-29

  datasetOpen access

  This package contains the replication file, which includes data sets obtained from public databases, for the paper titled "Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving." Additionally, we provide information on other purchasable databases necessary for replicating the results of this study. The subfolder "Part1_DataCleaning" contains the codes and public data sets required to construct the data sets that are needed for the empirical analysis. The subsequent subfolder, "Part2_DataAnalysis," includes the codes used to generate the empirical results presented in the paper. A readme file is included to provide further details, along with comments within the codes and various folders for enhanced clarity. We also include the list of data sets that need to be purchased in order to be able to run the codes in the subfolder "Part1_DataCleaning". Most of the codes were executed using SAS, Stata, WRDS SAS Studio, and Python. Due to the computational complexity involved and the large size of data sets utilised in the study, the majority of the codes were executed on servers equipped with at least 512 GB of RAM and at least 1.5 terabytes of free space.

  PublisherDOI

• The Political Power of Firms

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper presents a holistic view of the channels of political influence of large corporations in modern democracies, focusing not only on well-studied instruments, such as campaign contributions and lobbying, but also on more opaque ones, such as charitable giving, political connections, dark money, public advocacy, and employee mobilization.Our quantitative perspective draws on recent work on US politics, including congressional voting, special interest politics, corporate political connections, grassroots, and philanthropic activities.In the process, the chapter offers also a discussion of recent methodological innovations around money in politics.We conclude with some considerations on corporate political disclosure.

  PublisherDOI

• The Political Power of Firms

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Climate Politics in the United States

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-08-01

  report1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Climate Politics in the United States

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Regulation

  Annual Review of Economics · 2025-04-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article presents recent methodological innovations in the area of cost and benefit assessment of government regulation, in both a prospective and a retrospective sense. The focus of this review is mostly limited to the United States and from the Economics discipline's perspective. Much of the extant progress in measurement has occurred on the front of private costs of compliance. Private benefits, social costs, and social benefits remain much less systematically organized and more arduous to quantitatively assess, mostly due to the difficulty of standardizing partial and general equilibrium counterfactuals. We offer a discussion on potential future methodological improvements in cost–benefit analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• The Increasing Cost of Buying American

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-09-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The latest resurgence in the U.S. of policies aimed at reducing imports and bolstering domestic production has included the expansion of Buy American provisions. While some of these are new and untested, in this paper we evaluate long-standing procurement limitations on the purchase of foreign products by the U.S. Federal Government. We use procurement micro-data to first map and detect employment effects of government purchases and then calibrate a quantitative trade model adapted to include features relevant to Buy American: a government sector, policy barriers in final and intermediate goods, labor force participation, and external economies of scale. We show that, while current Buy American provisions on final goods purchase have created up to 100,000 jobs at a cost of between $111,500 and $137,700 per job, the recently announced tightening of the policy on the use of foreign inputs will create fewer jobs at a higher cost of $154,000 to $237,800 per job. We also find scant evidence of the use of Buy American rules as an effective industrial policy.

  PublisherDOI

• The Increasing Cost of Buying American

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Increasing Cost of Buying American

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Francesco Trebbi

  171 shared

• Marianne Bertrand

  University of Chicago

  48 shared

• Bingjing Li

  42 shared

• Olimpia Cutinelli Rendina

  Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

  18 shared

• Raymond Fisman

  11 shared

• Maria D. Tito

  Federal Reserve Board of Governors

  9 shared

• Giovanni Gallipoli

  University of Chicago

  6 shared

• Germán Pupato

  6 shared

Labs

• Clausen Center for International Business and PolicyPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  2005

• B.A.

  University of Bologna

Awards & honors

• Killam Research Prize (2017)
• Bank of Canada Governor’s Award (2015)
• Harry G. Johnson Prize for the Best paper in the Canadian Jo…
• CWEN Young Researcher Award (2012)
• Winner of the EIIT (Empirical Investigation in International…