Hugo Salgado's Research History   

My research interests are related to Applied Microeconomics, Firms Behavior, Regulation in Natural Resources and Industrial Organization. This is the history of my short life as a researcher.  If you want to take a look to my papers, go here.

1.  My interests for becoming a serious researcher in Economics started when  I was studying a Master in Environmental Economics in Chile.  My Master thesis  consisted on a simulation of the effects of different regulatory systems based on economic incentives in one of Chile main fisheries.  The results of this research were published in the Latin American Journal of Economics and you can look at the paper here.  In this research I constructed different models of firms behavior under different Individual Transferable Quota systems, and I simulated individual firm's optimal behavior using real data.  The individual behavior is aggregated for the fishery and conclusions are drawn about the different incentives and market results generated by these regulatory systems .

2.  After I finished my Master Program, I was hired in the Department of Economics.  During this time, my colleague and good friend Carlos Chavez finished his Ph.D. in the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and he went back to Chile.  He was full of new ideas about the importance of compliance and enforcement of regulation in Natural Resources.  So, we wrote some projects and conducted research to apply his research ideas to fishery regulatory systems.  The results of this joint research effort were two papers.  A theoretical paper was published in the Journal "Environmental and Resource Economics", which you can view here.  An empirical paper which is an application of this model to a Chilean Fishery has been accepted for publication in "Marine Policy".

3.  During the time I had the opportunity of work in the Master Program in Concepcion, I advised several master thesis.  Two of them have being published.   First, the results of Juan Pablo Diaz master thesis were published in the chilean journal "Investigaciones Marinas".  In this paper we apply a dynamic model of optimal patch management in fisheries to analyze an important problem existent in Chile.  The issue was related to the access of big-scale  fishermen to the zone reserved for small-scale fishermen.  You can access this paper here (Spanish).   This work opened the window to a theoretical analysis and to join efforts with Pierre Cartigny and Walter Gomez, which lead us to write this paper.  This work has been submitted to a Journal and it is in revision process.

4.  Another good Master thesis I advised was that of Carlos Saldarriaga.  From his work we published this paper in the Journal "Environmental and Development Economics" (also joint with Walter Gomez).  This paper is about Economics of Biodiversity Conservation.  Here we apply a model of optimal species conservation to the Huemul Conservation Zone in a part of the Andes Mountains in Chile.  This model takes into account the spatial characteristics of the area under management, in particular the preferences for habitat of the Huemul and also the potential economic activities that could be developed in these areas.  The main conclusion of the paper is that both Huemul population and economic rents could be increased  with a reallocation of economic activities and conservation areas. 

5.  After a few years I left Concepcion to start my Ph.D. studies.  In Berkeley I had the opportunity to meet my good friend Manuel Romero Hernandez, who was visiting Berkeley from Islas Canarias, Spain.  During his stay at Berkeley, I helped him with a research in the European Airline Market.  Our first analysis is a working paper in the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley (you can take a look here) and an updated version was published as working paper in the Fundacion de Estudios de Economia Aplicada, Espana (look here).

6.  Working as GSR for Jeff Perloff and Larry Karp, when they were writing their book "Estimating Market Power and Strategy", I discovered the amazing world of the empirical estimation of dynamic games.  I then began working in a model of a Duopoly for the computer CPU industry with dynamics given by learning-by-doing.  Based on this work I wrote my second year econometric paper and my orals examination proposal.  In this first paper I estimated a model with a very simple linear demand function and a aggregation of products at the generation level to analyze the degree of collusion in the market in the dynamic model (A long but "under-construction-and-revision" version is available here).  I am currently working in a more detailed model which considers a random coefficient model of demand (BLP/NEVO) and the estimation of learning rates in the cost function at a more detailed product level.  I will post my research results here as soon as I can finish estimating this new model.

7.  I am also currently working in some other research projects, all related to natural resource economics and industrial organization.  I will put updates as soon as I get some interesting outputs.