Hello there, I am Guido!

I am a fifth-year PhD Economics student at the European University Institute. My advisors are Russell Cooper and Giancarlo Corsetti. My research interests is in macroeconomics, with a focus on market power and the behavior of firms and workers.

Before joining the EUI I worked as a pre-doctoral Research Assistant at IESE Business School for Carles Vergara and Núria Mas.

You can find my CV here.

Work in Progress

Crushing the Competition: the Pro-Competitive Effects of Relative Performance Evaluation (with Bruno Pellegrino and Shihan Shen)

Relative Performance Evaluation (RPE) is a common feature of executive compensation contracts that is used to incentivize managerial effort. A side effect of RPE that is lesser-known (yet trivial to prove theoretically) is to alter product market conduct, as it provides a motive for managers to hurt competitors’ profits rather than pursue the maximization of their own firm’s profits. To quantify these effects, we build a general equilibrium model of oligopoly with GHL demand and ultra-realistic managerial incentives. In our model, the pro-competitive effects of RPE increase with the assortativity between the network of product rivalries and the network of RPE benchmarking relationships. To construct the latter, we undertake a massive data analysis effort to process highly-unstructured data from over 15,000 executive compensation contracts. We then use our model to quantify, firm-by-firm, the effect of RPE on the firm’s supply decisions, allocative efficiency and consumer welfare.

Presentations: SIOE 2023, UChicago Stigler Center Affiliate Conference, EUI, Rice Brownbag, Oligo Workshop 2025, CICM 2025, SED 2025, SEA 2025 (scheduled)

Game, Set and Match: Playing, Learning, and Retiring in Professional Tennis (with Christopher J. Flinn and Pietro Garibaldi)

This paper investigates the timing of retirement in high-intensity occupations where performance signals are noisy, and agents must learn about their latent ability. Using a rich monthly panel of over 10,000 professional tennis players from 2000 to 2021, we characterize the relationship between performance trajectories and career exits. We document three robust stylized facts: (1) careers are generally short—with a median duration of three years—and highly right-skewed; (2) players typically retire following a decline from their peak performance rather than at the peak; and (3) career length is positively correlated with peak ability. Survival analysis reveals substantial heterogeneity, where lower-ranked players exit rapidly while elite players sustain careers into their thirties. These patterns suggest that retirement decisions are driven significantly by an information-updating process regarding competitive fit, distinct from pure age-related physical decline.

Contacts

You can find me at the following contacts. I am happy to connect and talk about research, collaborations, grad school.

Address

European University Institute
Department of Economics
Via delle Fontanelle 18
50014 Fiesole

Email: guido.bongioanni@eui.eu
Github: https://github.com/bonogg
Twitter: twitter.com/bonogg