Hi! I am a third-year PhD candidate in Economics at Imperial College London. My main field is empirical industrial organization, which I use to study how market power shapes innovation incentives and the direction of technological change.
I was a pre-doctoral research fellow at Yale. I hold an MSc in Economics from UCL and a BSc in Economics from the Sapienza University of Rome.
During the 2026/27 academic year, I will visit Columbia University (hosted by Andrea Prat) and MIT (hosted by Daron Acemoglu).
Research
Working Papers
• Interlocking Directorates and Innovation
Connections between competing companies usually affect innovation, but their net effects and mechanisms remain unclear. This paper studies these effects by analyzing a prevalent type of corporate connection: shared board members. To account for persistent differences in board member ability, I introduce a new empirical strategy that uses estimated board member fixed effects from the AKM model as control variables in a second stage. I find that interlocked firms innovate more and cite their interlocked partners’ patents more often. However, these new patents do not have higher market-based values and are increasingly likely to be continuation patents. Cross citations also shift increasingly toward older and more technologically distant partner patents.
@unpublished{DeMaria2026Interlocking,
author = {De Maria, Mirko},
title = {Interlocking Directorates and Innovation},
year = {2026},
month = may,
note = {Working paper},
url = {https://ssrn.com/abstract=6693818}
}
Selected Work in Progress
• Market Power, Venture Capital, and Technological Progress
• Partial Identification of AKM Models
Teaching
Imperial College London (Teaching Assistant)
Math Camp (PhD), 2025, 2026
Business Economics (Executive MBA), 2024
Business Economics (BSc), 2023
UCL (Teaching Assistant)
Introductory Economics (BSc), 2021, 2022