Tommaso Valletti

Tommaso holds a magna cum laude degree in engineering and a flute diploma from Turin.^[2] He also earned an MSc and PhD in economics from the London School of Economics.^[8]

He currently serves as the Head of the Department of Economics and Public Policy at Imperial College London, where he has been working in shaping academic research on economic competition and public policy.^[8]

Valletti’s research focuses on Industrial Organization and ways to improve public interventions in markets.

In work with Christos Genakos, Valletti finds evidence of a “waterbed effect” in mobile phones  – whereby the regulatory pressure to cut certain network fees, can cause another set of prices to rise.^[9] Still in the telecoms industry, in work with Gabriel Ahlfeldt and Pantelis Koutroumpis, he devises a method to infer the willingness-to-pay for high-speed broadband internet via the impact that the rollout of the internet had on property prices in the UK.^[10] In work with Alessandro Gavazza and Mattia Nardotto, he finds that the rollout of the internet had a negative impact on voter turnout in UK elections.^[11]

With Giulio Federico and Greg Langus, he analyzes the impact that mergers have on innovation. In the absence of efficiencies and spillovers, they find a negative effect on consumer welfare and develop an “innovation theory of harm” that found application in antitrust cases such as the merger between Dow and Dupont,^[12] and Bayer and Monsanto.^[13][14]

His most cited work is on the identification of corruption and inefficiency in public procurement, in joint work with Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat.^[15]