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.
Working Papers
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, Network Science and Economics Conference 2026
Work in Progress
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