Short Bio & Research Activity


Francesco Trebbi I am the Bernard T. Rocca Jr. Chair and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business. I am also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where I co-direct the NBER Political Economy Program. I am a Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and of CESifo.

Before joining UC Berkeley, I was a faculty member at the University of British Columbia and at the University of Chicago. I received my PhD in Economics from Harvard University.

My academic research primarily focuses on Political Economy and Applied Microeconomics broadly defined. I have worked on political institutions and their design, elections and political campaigns, behavior in legislatures, campaign finance, lobbying, regulation, housing markets, and banking. I have also worked on topics related to the political economy of development, corruption, patronage, ethnic politics, and intra-state conflict. I have interests in Finance, Development Economics, and Macroeconomics.

My teaching interests are in Political Economy, Applied Econometrics, Macroeconomics, and Data Science.

I am currently a Co-Editor at Econometrica.


Recent Working Papers


The Cost of Regulatory Compliance in the United States (with Miao Ben Zhang and Michael Simkovic)

Abstract

Is the distribution of the burden of government regulation unequal across firms? Do regulatory compliance costs fall disproportionately on small businesses relative to others? We quantify firms’ regulatory compliance costs from 2002 to 2014 in terms of their labor spending to adhere to government rules. Detailed establishment-level occupation microdata, in combination with occupation-specific task information, allow us to recover the share of an establishment’s wage bill owing to employees engaged in regulatory compliance. On average, regulatory costs account for 1.34% to 3.33% of firms’ total wage bill, totaling up to $239 billion in 2014 and $289 billion when also accounting for capital. Our findings reveal an inverted-U relation between firms’ regulatory compliance costs and their employment size, with firms of around 500 employees experiencing about 40% higher compliance cost than small or large firms. Finally, we develop an instrumental variable methodology for decoupling the role of regulatory requirements from that of enforcement in driving changes in compliance costs for firms.

Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Regulation (with Matilde Bombardini and Miao Ben Zhang)
Prepared for Volume 17 (2025) of the Annual Review of Economics

Abstract

This article presents a discussion of recent methodological innovations in the area of cost and benefit assessment of government regulation, in both a prospective and retrospective sense. Much of the extant progress is presented on the front of private costs of compliance. Private benefits, social costs, and social benefits remain much less systematically organized and more arduous to quantitatively assess, mostly due to the difficulty of standardizing equilibrium counterfactuals. We offer a discussion of potential future methodological improvements in cost-benefit analysis.

The Political Power of Firms (with Matilde Bombardini)
Prepared for the North Holland Handbook of Political Economy (2025)

Abstract

This chapter presents a comprehensive approach and measurement of the political power of large corporations in modern democracies. In doing so, it also offers a discussion of recent methodological innovations in the area of money in politics in consolidated democracies. Our new quantitative perspective draws on recent work on US and EU politics, including congressional voting, the role of lobbying, political connections, voter mobilization, and philanthropic donations. We conclude with new considerations on corporate political disclosure.

Campaigning Against Populism: Emotions and Information in Real Election Campaigns (with Cesi Cruz and Julien Labonne)

Abstract

Populist politicians have leveraged direct connections with voters to win elections worldwide, often using emotional rather than policy appeals. Do these forms of campaigning work for programmatic politicians as well? We partner with a mainstream opposition political party to implement a field experiment during the 2019 Philippine Senatorial election to test the effectiveness of: (i) direct in-person appeals providing policy information; (ii) the addition of an activity designed to engender positive emotion. We show that direct engagement providing policy information increases vote share for the party, even in a clientelistic context. Additionally, while the emotional activity increases engagement with the campaign in the short term, the information-only treatment was more effective. Last, we present evidence that the treatments operated through learning and persuasion channels: treated voters were more likely to know the party, more certain about their knowledge, and gave higher ratings to the party’s quality and proposed policies.