Welcome to David Abraham’s professional website

About me

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at London Business School who will be on the academic job market this coming cycle. My research interests are applied micro and macro economics, with a particular focus on belief formation.

My full CV can be found here.

Peer Effects in Entrepreneurship, with Andrea Galeotti (LBS) and Adam Szeidl (CEU) (JMP)

[Paper] [Slides]

We study how exposure to peers with entrepreneurship experience affects new entrepreneurship by exploiting quasi-random student assignment in an MBA program. Successful peers increase, while unsuccessful peers decrease successful entrepreneurship, by 15\% each, so that their combined effects cancel. Successful peers decrease unsuccessful entrepreneurship. These findings favor a model where students are uncertain about their business idea and successful peers are effective at screening. We structurally estimate this model and show that a policy of increasing meetings with entrepreneur peers need not affect successful entrepreneurship, but a policy of reallocating meetings to successful peers has large positive effects.

_{Presented: BSE-Networks (2024), Cambridge-Janeway (2025), LBS-TADC (2025)}

Low Wages Aren’t a Growing Problem, with Simcha Barkai (BC)

[Paper] [Slides]

Statements by high-pro le political gures and supporting academic research have led to a common perception of worsening job prospects for low-wage workers in the US. In this paper, we show that since the early 1980s there has been a decline in the share of workers earning low wages. This holds across sub-populations and across thresholds for determining what constitutes a low wage. Much of the decline occurs over two periods: the late 1990s and the late 2010s. The decline is greater and steadier for women than for men. We further show that the worker-level persistence of low wages has not increased, and has likely decreased, over time.

_{Presented: St. Gallen-VALURED (2024)}