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 summa cum laude 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
This paper quantifies how shared board members at competing companies affect innovation. To account for persistent differences in board member ability, I introduce a new empirical strategy that relies on using estimated board member fixed effects from the AKM model as control variables in a second stage. I show that board interlocks are associated with higher innovative output, which is matched by a parallel increase in cross citations between the two interlocked partners. However, this increase in patent counts is concentrated in continuation patents, which are associated with strategic patenting motives. Furthermore, the cross citations go increasingly towards partner patents that are older, more prominent, and not technologically proximate to the citing patent. Therefore, while board interlocks do increase patents, this paper points to strategic patenting behavior being the dominant mechanism as opposed to technological learning.
@unpublished{DeMaria2026Interlocking,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