My name is Amirhossein Tavakoli, and I am a PhD Candidate at the UBC’s Vancouver School of Economics. My research interests are in Innovation, Public Economics, and Labor Economics. My current research project studies the impact of an R&D tax credit on firms’ growth, worker earnings, and innovation outputs.

Working Papers

Job Transitions and Employee Earnings After Acquisitions: Linking Corporate and Worker Outcomes, with David Arnold, Kevin Milligan, Terry Moon

Abstract | Paper

This paper connects changes in employer characteristics through job transitions to employee earnings following mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Using firm balance sheet data linked to individual earnings data in Canada and a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that after M\&As acquirers expand while targets shrink substantially relative to their matched control groups. Furthermore, workers at target firms suffer losses in earnings, and this decline in earnings is largely driven by workers who move to other firms after an M&A event. We find that workers leaving target firms after M&As move to larger firms with higher wage premiums, but still experience a wage decline potentially due to a loss of firm-specific human capital or backloaded contracts. It appears that job transitions and a subsequent loss of match-specific premiums primarily explain the post-M\&A decline in worker earnings in our setting.

Corporate Acquisitions and Investment: Evidence from Europe? with David Arnold and Terry Moon

Abstract | Paper

This paper assesses how corporate M&As affect firms’ investment in long-term capital. Using financial data (2009 – 2018) for 10 European countries, we compare firms that went through M&As with similar non-M&A firms before and after the events. We find that acquirers significantly decreased their fixed assets after M&As and that the reduction was not driven by reallocation between merging parties or across different types of assets. Heterogeneity analyses based on industries reveal that the decline in investment was unlikely driven by the market power channel. Instead, acquirers appear to reduce long-term assets and increase debts to finance their acquisitions.

Publications

What do one hundred million transactions tell us about demand elasticity of gasoline?, with Mohammad Vesal, Mohammad H. Rahmati

Abstract | Paper

The price elasticity of gasoline demand is a key parameter in the evaluation of various policies. However, most of the literature uses aggregate data to identify this elasticity. Temporal and spatial aggregation make such elasticity estimates biased. We employ a unique dataset of all gasoline transactions in Iran during a 4-month period around an unexpected exogenous price change to identify that price elasticity. We also identify a significant withholding behaviour by consumers in response to anticipated price changes. The consumers reduce or postpone their purchases when they expect a decrease in prices. Controlling for date fixed effects would eliminate homogeneous withholding responses. However, heterogeneous responses to this anticipated price change would lead to an overestimation of price elasticity. After controlling for date, individual, and location fixed effects as well as the withholding behaviour, we estimate a robust significant price elasticity of − 0.085. Aggregation of the same data by week, month, and city yields an estimate of − 0.3, indicating a significant bias in earlier studies.