About

Sara Moreira is an Associate Professor (untenured) in the Department of Strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, where she has been a faculty member since July 2016. Her research interests include applied macroeconomics and firm dynamics, with a particular focus on the dynamics of business formation, growth, and innovation. She is engaged in research projects that utilize granular data from large datasets covering firms' operating decisions, such as employment composition, product offerings, and advertising spending. Her work involves analyzing these datasets and estimating macroeconomic equilibrium models to better understand and quantify the economic mechanisms that influence firm behavior and innovation activities. Sara holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago, a Masters in Applied Econometrics and Forecasting from ISEG Lisbon School of Management, and a Bachelor of Sciences in Economics from Universidade do Porto FEP. She has also worked as a Research Economist at Banco de Portugal from 2005 to 2010.

Research topics

• Industrial organization
• Marketing
• Business
• Process management
• Economics
• Commerce
• Market economy
• Financial system
• Mathematics

Selected publications

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

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

  article

  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

• Scalable Expertise: How Standardization Drives Scale and Scope

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Artificial Intelligence Based Hyperespectral Biomass Estimator for Cyanobacteria Cultivation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

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

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2025-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  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

• The Rise of Specialized Financial Products

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Rise of Specialized Financial Products

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Life Cycle of Products: Evidence and Implications

  Journal of Political Economy · 2023-07-17 · 44 citations

  articleSenior author

  We document that sales of individual products decline steadily throughout most of the product life cycle. Products quickly become obsolete as they face competition from newer products sold by competing firms and the same firm. We build a dynamic model that highlights an innovation-obsolescence cycle, where firms need to introduce new products to grow; otherwise, their portfolios become obsolete as rivals introduce their own new products. By introducing new products, however, firms accelerate the decline of their own existing products, further depressing their sales. This mechanism has sizable implications for quantifying economic growth and the impact of innovation policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Innovation for Innovators: The Financing of Intangibles

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2023-05-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper examines the characteristics of firms that adopt new financial products and their association with measures of performance. We build a novel firm-level panel dataset and document a positive association between intangible capital and the adoption of new products. We also find that access to external financing through new types of securities is associated with size growth and further investments into intangibles. These findings have important implications for understanding the role that financial innovation can play in meeting the financing needs of firms that rely heavily on intangible capital.

  PublisherDOI

• The expansion of varieties in the new age of advertising

  Review of Economic Dynamics · 2023-08-05 · 22 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The expansion of varieties in the new age of advertising

  2023-09-28

  paratextOpen accessSenior author

  The last decades have seen large improvements in digital advertising technology that allowed firms to better target specific consumer tastes. This research studies the relationship among digital advertising, the rise of varieties, and economic welfare. We develop a model of advertising and varieties where firms choose the intensity of digital ads directed at specific consumers as well as traditional ads that are undirected. The calibrated model shows that improvements in digital advertising have driven the rise in varieties over time. Empirical evidence is presented using detailed micro data on firms' products and advertising choices for the 1995-2015 period. Causal analysis using exogenous variation in consumers' differential access to the internet supports the suggested mechanism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David Argente

  Yale University

  11 shared

• Munseob Lee

  University of California, San Diego

  7 shared

• Conceição Nogueira

  Prefeitura Municipal de Campos dos Goytacazes

  5 shared

• Sara Magalhães

  Universidade do Porto

  5 shared

• Pedro Pita Barros

  Universidade Nova de Lisboa

  5 shared

• Salomé Baslandze

  Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

  4 shared

• Manuel Coutinho Pereira

  Banco de Portugal

  4 shared

• Douglas Hanley

  University of Pittsburgh

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Northwestern University, Fletcher Undergraduate Research Awa…
• Northwestern University, Fletcher Undergraduate Research Awa…