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Dr Tommaso Bighelli

Dr Tommaso Bighelli
Current Position

since 9/24

Research Affiliate

Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) – Member of the Leibniz Association

since 9/24

Research Economist

Bank of England

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Research Interests
  • firm dynamics
  • productivity and reallocation
  • market structure
  • taxation

Tommaso Bighelli joined the institute as a Research Affiliate in September 2024. His research focuses on firm dynamics, factors reallocation and productivity, market structures and taxation.

Tommaso Bighelli received his bachelor's and master's degree from Sapienza University in Rome as well as a master of research in economic analysis from the IDEA Graduate Programme at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He completed his doctorate at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena.

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Dr Tommaso Bighelli
Dr Tommaso Bighelli
- Department Structural Change and Productivity
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Publications

Citations
120

Cross-country Evidence on the Allocation of COVID-19 Government Subsidies and Consequences for Productivity

Tommaso Bighelli Tibor Lalinsky Juuso Vanhala

in: Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, June 2023

Abstract

We study the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and related policy support on productivity. We employ an extensive micro-distributed exercise to access otherwise unavailable individual data on firm performance and government subsidies. Our cross-country evidence for five EU countries shows that the pandemic led to a significant short-term decline in aggregate productivity and the direct support to firms had only a limited positive effect on productivity developments. A thorough comparative analysis of the distribution of employment and overall direct subsidies, considering separately also relative firm-level size of support and the probability of being supported, reveals ambiguous cross-country results related to the firm-level productivity and points to the decisive role of other firm characteristics.

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European Firm Concentration and Aggregate Productivity

Tommaso Bighelli Filippo di Mauro Marc Melitz Matthias Mertens

in: Journal of the European Economic Association, No. 2, 2023

Abstract

This paper derives a European Herfindahl–Hirschman concentration index from 15 micro-aggregated country datasets. In the last decade, European concentration rose due to a reallocation of economic activity toward large and concentrated industries. Over the same period, productivity gains from an increasing allocative efficiency of the European market accounted for 50% of European productivity growth while markups stayed constant. Using country-industry variation, we show that changes in concentration are positively associated with changes in productivity and allocative efficiency. This holds across most sectors and countries and supports the notion that rising concentration in Europe reflects a more efficient market environment rather than weak competition and rising market power.

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