I am Riccardo Silvestrini, PhD candidate at the Erasmus School of Economics and the Tinbergen Institute under the supervision of Dr. Agnieszka Markiewicz and Prof. Ivo Arnold.
Research interests
I conduct research primarily in Macroeconomics, from the perspective of applied theory, but my interests extend to the fields of Firm Dynamics and Industrial Organization.
Market Power Increase and Sectoral Heterogeneity: the Role of e-Commerce Platforms
My JMP studies how the rise of e-commerce platforms contributed to the increase in market power in the US. I present a model with firm heterogeneity, oligopolistic competition, and Input-Output linkages, in which platforms allow firms to decrease their input costs in exchange for subscription fees. The use of platforms explains the rise of market power because it transforms variable costs into overhead costs. This enables market leaders to increase their cost advantage, since they are able to exploit the platforms more intensively. Once calibrated to the data, the model attributes one third of the observed increase in markups to the introduction of e-commerce platforms.
Read more about my paper on GitHub (pdf)
CV
Download my CV on GitHub (pdf)