Welcome to David Abraham’s professional website
About me
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at London Business School. My research interests are applied micro and macro economics, with a particular focus on economic history. In July 2026 I will start work as a Competition Economist at Fideres based in London, UK.
My full CV can be found here.
Peer Effects in Entrepreneurship, with Andrea Galeotti (LBS) and Adam Szeidl (CEU)
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)
Aggregate Effects of Antitrust Enforcement
[Paper]
What are the direct and indirect effects of antitrust policy enforcement? That question relates to multiple areas within the economics literature: competition policy’s contribution to overall welfare; increasing firm size and its consequences; and the impact of a specific fiscal policy. This paper provides three contributions. First, it offers new estimates for the economic impact of antitrust enforcement. Second, it links the active debate over markups with the antitrust and fiscal policy literatures. Third, it leverages a subset of a novel dataset of US government appropriations.
Low Wages Aren’t a Growing Problem, with Simcha Barkai (BC) (revise and resubmit at Labour Economics)
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)