Alejandro Robinson-Cortés

I'm on the job market and will be available for interviews at the 2020 ASSA Meetings in San Diego, California, and at the 2019 EEA Job Market in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Science (Economics) in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech. I am an empirical economist working at the intersection of empirical industrial organization and market design. My job-market paper is about matching in foster care.

Fields: Empirical Industrial Organization; Market Design and Matching; Econometrics; Applied Microeconomics.

Here is a link to my CV

Job Market Paper

• “Who Gets Placed Where and Why? An Empirical Framework for Foster Care Placement”
  
  

  Abstract: This paper presents an empirical framework to study the assignment of children into foster homes and its implications on placement outcomes. The empirical application uses a novel dataset of confidential foster care records from Los Angeles County, CA. The estimates of the empirical model are used to examine policy interventions aimed at improving placement outcomes. In general, it is observed that market thickness tends to improve expected placement outcomes. If placements were assigned across all the administrative regions of the county, the model predicts that (i) the average number of foster homes children go through before exiting foster care would decrease by 8% and (ii) the distance between foster homes and children's schools would be reduced by 54%.

Working Papers

• “Executive compensation and competitive pressure in the product market: How does firm entry shape managerial incentives?” (joint with Kaniska Dam) (R&R Mathematical Social Science)
  
  

  Abstract: Motivated by empirical evidence, we develop an incentive contracting model under oligopolistic competition to study how incumbent firms adjust managerial incentives following deregulation policies that enhance competition. We show that firms elicit higher managerial effort by offering stronger incentives as an optimal response to entry, as long as incumbent firms act as production leaders. Our model draws a link between an industry-specific feature, the time needed to build production capacity, and the effect that product market competition has on executive compensation. We offer novel testable implications regarding how this industry-specific feature shapes the incentive structure of executive pay.

Work in Progress

• “An Experimental Study of Decentralized Matching” (joint with Federico Echenique and Leeat Yariv)

References

California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA

• Matthew Shum [website | email]
• Federico Echenique [website | email]

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

• Leeat Yariv [website | email]