Michela Bonani

Michela Bonani

Postdoctoral Researcher, Economics

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Biography

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. I am also affiliated with ESSEC Business School, working on topics within the BlaBlaModes project. Before that, I completed my PhD in economics at Tilburg University.

My main research interests are in Empirical Industrial Organization and Market Design, focusing on the digital economy, transportation, and standardization. In my work, I combine economic models of strategic interactions, market data, and econometric tools for structural estimation and causal inference.

You can download my CV here.

Email: michela.bonani@upf.edu

Interests
  • Empirical Industrial Organization
  • Applied Microeconometrics
  • Market Design
Education
  • PhD Economics, 2023

    Tilburg University

  • MSc Economics and Social Sciences, 2014

    Bocconi University

  • BSc Management and Business Administration, 2011

    Bocconi University

Working Papers

Uniform vs Competing Standards: A Structural Analysis of the U.S. Wireless Telecommunications Industry (Job Market Paper)

Different regulations to impose compatibility have prompted fierce debates in a wide range of industries around whether a uniform standard is more beneficial than multiple competing standards because of the ambiguous welfare implications of compatibility. This paper studies the potential impact of unifying two incompatible standards for wireless networks on firms’ coverage investment choices, profits, prices, and consumer welfare in the U.S. wireless telecommunications market from 2015 to 2018. I develop and estimate a structural model of consumer choices of wireless carriers and 3G coverage investment to quantify the impact of a compatible network. My model captures two main features of wireless standards. First, since different standards provide different services to consumers, the model allows consumers to prefer one standard. Second, it accounts for the positive network effects among firms under the same standard path. Using counterfactual experiments, I find that a uniform standard is the welfare superior policy, regardless of the technology chosen to unify the wireless network. Whereas the overall producer surplus is higher when moving to uniform wireless networks, not all firms are better off under a uniform network. The counterfactual analysis also underlines a heterogeneous effect of a single standard network on consumers: whether consumers benefit from compatibility depends on the technology chosen. The decline in the consumer surplus under a 3G Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) is explained (1) by an increase of the equilibrium prices by two firms that does not compensate for the decline in the network coverages, (2) by customers with existing handsets being stranded with the UMTS standard.

Work in progress

The Social Welfare Implications of a Multimodal Technology: Evidence from BlaBlaModes

CV

A full version of my CV is available here.

Teaching

Current

I am not teaching any courses for the current academic year.

Past

Business Economics (MSc in Management), Spring 2023

TA Econometrics for ECO (BSc in Economics), 2020 - 2022

TA Data communication for policy analysis (BSc in Economics) - 2020

TA Industrial Economics (BSc in Economics), 2018 - 2020

TA Microeconomics: Theory and Analysis (BSc in Economics), Fall 2017