Dmitry Sedov

About

I do research, work with exciting data and code for fun.

In my research I use large-scale geospatial datasets, quantitative economic models and causal inference tools to analyze firm location decisions and consumer behavior in spatial markets. Sometimes I also work on economic theory.

Previously, I have worked at CRA in the Antitrust and Competition Practice. I love coding, working with data and learning new skills to solve problems.

When there is free time, I enjoy doing sports, learning languages and exploring visual art. I used to visit my friends all over the world when travelling was a thing.

How Efficient Are Firm Location Configurations? Empirical Evidence from the Food Service Industry (Job Market Paper)

Leveraging detailed data on roughly 400,000 US urban restaurants, I study the welfare losses due to inefficient firm location configurations in the food service industry. I first obtain restaurant locations and foot traffic from SafeGraph, collect their characteristics from Yelp and scrape local commercial real estate rental rates from major listing aggregators. Next, I estimate a structural model of consumer demand, firm entry and capacity optimization. I then develop an algorithmic approximation approach to analyzing the efficiency of firm location configurations and explore the welfare gains available through the spatial reconfiguration of firms. In the median market, reconfiguration can lead to an 8.51% increase in total industry profits with a simultaneous 7.73% improvement in the consumer welfare metric. I find suggestive evidence that firms' incentives to spatially differentiate play an important role in shaping inefficient location configurations.

Do Local Businesses Benefit from Stadiums? The Case of Major Professional Sports League Arenas (with T. Abbiasov, R & R at Regional Science and Urban Economics)

Stadium subsidies are often allocated on the premise that sports venues benefit the local economy by bringing new customers to the surrounding area. We estimate such local spillover effects using foot traffic data on large US stadiums and nearby businesses. We use the resulting estimates to compare the benefits stadiums generate for the local economy to the allocated subsidies.

Almost-Truthful Mediation Enables Information Exchange between Agents with Opposing Interests (published in Review of Economic Design)

Information necessary for decision-making is often distributed among agents with opposing interests. Receiving information is desirable for the agents, while revealing it may be privately harmful. In this paper I design a class of almost-truthful mediation protocols that incentivize information exchange in a succinct model capturing such conflicts.

Restaurant Closures during the Pandemic: A Descriptive Analysis (published in Economics Letters)

Using Yelp and Safegraph data, I study restaurant and location characteristics related to restaurant closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. I find that higher rated restaurants as well as restaurants located further away from central city areas were less likely to close during 2020.