Matilde Bombardini

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

Selected publications

• Hall of Mirrors: Corporate Philanthropy and Strategic Advocacy

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2021-06-30 · 81 citations

  article

  Abstract Information is central to designing effective policy, and policy makers often rely on competing interests to separate useful from biased information. We show how this logic of virtuous competition can break down, using a new and comprehensive data set on U.S. federal regulatory rulemaking for 2003–2016. For-profit corporations and nonprofit entities are active in the rulemaking process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policy makers, however, may not be fully…

  PublisherDOI

• Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Did US Politicians Expect the China Shock?

  American Economic Review · 2022-12-30 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Information sets, expectations, and preferences of politicians are fundamental, but unobserved determinants of their policy choices. Employing repeated votes in the US House of Representatives on China’s normal trade relations (NTR) status during the two decades straddling China’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession, we apply a moment inequality approach designed to deliver consistent estimates under weak informational assumptions on the information sets of members of Congress. This methodo…

  PublisherDOI

• Lobbying Behind the Frontier

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2021-08-01 · 6 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter investigates the non-market response of firms to international trade shocks increasing the level of competition in U.S. industries. Lobbying expenditures increase as a consequence of import changes related to the China shock. The effect on lobbying is not homogeneous across firms and it concentrates particularly in those producers which are behind the technological frontier. We discuss theoretical mechanisms driving lobbying of firms away from the technological frontier: not only th…

  PublisherDOI

• Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-01-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen access

  Institutional ownership of U.S. corporations has increased ten-fold since 1950.We examine whether these new concentrated owners influence portfolio firms' political activities, as a window into the larger question of whether institutional investors can wield their control to extract benefits from portfolio firms.We find that after the acquisition of a large stake, a firm's political action committee (PAC) giving mirrors more closely that of the acquiring investment management company (in our pre…

  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…

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Ann E. Harrisonh-63
• Frederico Finanh-39
• Ernesto Dal Bóh-27