Job Market Paper

A New Order? Digital Disruption and Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Does the rise of digital marketplaces primarily benefit large incumbent firms or facilitate the entry of entrepreneurs, including those from minority backgrounds? This paper studies the growth of food delivery applications in the UK—UberEats and Deliveroo—and their impacts on local restaurants. To study this, I construct a novel dataset that measures the staggered spatial expansion of these apps and I employ a dynamic difference-in-differences framework. I find that app entry increases local restaurant counts (by 35%) and employment (by 12%) over four years and does not crowd out dine-in expenditures. This increase is driven by the entry of small and independent businesses, with ethnic minority entrepreneurs gaining disproportionately from lower entry costs and reduced dependence on prime locations. This democratization in entrepreneurship fosters greater diversity in cuisine offerings, enhancing consumer choice.

Other Working Papers

Understanding multi-layered sanctions: A firm-level analysis

This paper examines which types of firms are hit by multi-layered sanctions, quantifies the extent of the economic impact on the affected firms, and identifies the channels through which these effects are propagated. To this end, I use a text-based approach from computational linguistics to gauge the exposure of publicly listed Iranian firms to sanctions, validating this measure through its anticipated fluctuation over time and across industries. The findings reveal three key insights. First, Iranian firms report significant challenges due to sanctions, exceeding COVID-19 concerns by up to 20%. Second, politically-connected and non-connected firms suffer equally from sanctions; for every $1 loss inflicted on connected firms, an externality of $5 is imposed on non-connected firms, considering their economic scale. This contradicts the idea that sanctions only inflict harm on political decision-makers. Third, sanctions are hurtful; firms with higher exposure to sanctions endure greater losses in stock market value in the wake of unanticipated sanction events. Sanctions also lead to reduced sales, investment and hiring. Furthermore, the study reveals that sanctions impact firms via several mechanisms, the primary one being the limitation of access to export destinations.

Media Coverage: VoxEU Column, The Sanctions Age Podcast (YouTube, Spotify, ApplePodcast), Tejarate Farda, RouhaniHassan.com, Donya-e Eghtesad, Clingendael

Presentations: 8th Monash-Warwick-Zurich-CEPR Text-as-Data Workshop, Text-as-Data in Economics Workshop at the University of Liverpool, Political Economy, Development, and Labour seminars at LSE, UCL, TeIAS, and Princeton

Immigration and Political Realignment

This paper examines how immigration reshapes political landscapes, centring on the influx of immigrants from the EU's 2004 enlargement and its implications for the UK. I use a new variation in exposure to immigration based on migrant flows across various industries coupled with the employment structure in each region. Addressing potential concerns of endogeneity, I introduce a novel shift-share IV design, harnessing the industry-specific flow of migrants to regions outside the UK within the pre-2004 EU. The findings reveal a significant impact on support for the right-wing UK Independence Party and the Brexit Leave campaign, accompanied by a decline in Labour Party support. Moreover, the research indicates that voters' social attitudes toward immigration become more adverse in response to immigration. Political parties, particularly Conservatives, are also observed to increasingly engage with the topic of immigration in constituencies most affected by immigration, typically marked by negative rhetoric. The paper reconciles these findings by highlighting how immigration shocks entrench immigration cleavage, realigning political conflict from traditional economic lines to new cultural dimensions.

Presentations: 39th meeting of the European Economic Association, 2nd Junior Workshop on the Economics of Migration LISER (University of Luxembourg), 3rd University of Milan Junior Economists Meeting, LSE Political Economy, Development, and Labour seminars, TeIAS, Pol-Econ seminar at Princeton

Work in Progress

The Impact of Self-Employment on Income Trajectories: Evidence from Food Delivery Platforms (with Kate Smith, Helen Miller, and Isaac Delestre)

This paper examines how self-employment influences individual income trajectories using novel matched administrative tax data in the United Kingdom. By linking self-assessment tax returns of business owners with their employee tax records before and after entrepreneurship, we trace income dynamics surrounding the transition into and out of self-employment. We exploit the staggered geographic rollout of food delivery platforms as an exogenous shock increasing the probability of transitioning into entrepreneurship. We explore whether self-employment serves as a viable pathway for income growth, particularly at the lower end of the income distribution.

Distributional Health Effects of Food Delivery Apps

Nutritional inequality, linked to disparities in obesity and health outcomes, is well-documented. Can digital technology-driven food supply help mitigate or exacerbate this issue? Using the staggered rollout of food delivery apps in the UK, I find that while digital access generally shifts consumption toward less healthy foods, its impact varies significantly based on pre-existing factors such as education. I find while these apps reduce spatial disparities in food access, they may intensify inequalities across other dimensions.

From Streets to Ballots: The Impact of Climate Protests on Public Awareness and Electoral Outcomes (with Azhar Hussain and Ranjana Sinha)

This paper examines the impact of climate protests on public awareness and political outcomes in the US and Europe. Using data from Google Trends and GDELT, we find that climate protests significantly elevate climate change awareness, evidenced by increased search intensity and media coverage. Analyzing the 2019 European Parliamentary elections, we demonstrate that the Fridays for Future protests led to increased support for Green parties, indicating a shift in public sentiment towards environmental priorities. Through textual analysis of UK parliamentary speeches, we further observe that protest frequency correlates with a rise in climate discourse among policymakers, highlighting the potential of climate protests to shape both public opinion and political agendas.

Labour Market Dynamics and Political Change in the Europe (with Tim Besley and Torsten Persson)