Essays at the Intersection of Industrial Organization and Political Economy

I study the interplay between markets and politics. Across three different chapters, I offer novel theoretical contributions to the fields of Industrial Organization and Political Economy. In the first chapter, I study how political connections affect the optimal privatization policy in markets where public firms compete with private ones in quality and prices. In the second chapter (co-autored), we study how market concentration affects firms’ lobbying. We provide a welfare analysis of mergers that takes into account mergers’ political economy effects. In the third chapter (co-authored), we study how the extent of competitiveness of elections affect firms’ campaign contributions. These results highlight the importance of studying markets and politics as interconnected systems, where changes in one can influence the outcomes of the other.