Cournot seminar – Kossi Agbekponou (BETA)

Event details :

We are pleased to welcome to the next session of the BETA Cournot seminar organised with the support of the FSEG on Friday 16/10, at 02:00pm:

Kossi Agbekponou (BETA)

who will present his paper entitled

Shifting the Boundaries, Pricing Down the Chain: Firm-Level Evidence

Abstract: Global value chains have made firm boundary decisions central to performance, yet their implications for export prices remain poorly understood. We develop a framework in which vertical integration and productivity jointly shape pricing via costs and markups under Nash-in-Nash bargaining. Integration eliminates double marginalization but introduces organizational cost frictions, while productivity affects both costs and organizational choices, generating a counterintuitive sorting in which low-productivity firms integrate and high-productivity firms outsource. Using French customs data matched to AMADEUS balance-sheet information for agri-food firms (2002–2017), and an instrumental-variable strategy based on exogenous foreign shocks, we find that integration reduces export prices mainly through cumulative markup compression, while productivity lowers prices via costs but increases markups through sorting. Price effects of integration are thus heterogeneous and depend on productivity level.