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Based in New York City, Dr. Abrantes-Metz is a principal with LECG’s securities and antitrust practices. Her professional experience includes work in consulting and banking, as well as in government. Her main areas of specialization are econometrics, financial economics and applied industrial organization. She is also a specialist in macroeconomics and monetary economics. Currently Dr. Abrantes-Metz serves as a consultant for special projects with the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission. She is also the author of several articles on econometric methods, conspiracies and manipulations, gasoline and pharmaceuticals, and has published in peer-reviewed journals such as the International Journal of Industrial Organization and the Journal of Pharmaceutical Finance, Economics and Policy as well as trade publications including the ABA Economics Committee Newsletter and The Antitrust Source.
In private consulting and as an economist at the Federal Trade Commission, Dr. Abrantes-Metz has worked in mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property, predatory pricing, damages, conspiracies and manipulations, mass torts, valuation, stock options backdating and springloading, pricing, and forecasting. This work has covered a number of industries such as precious metals and derivatives, cable TV, boats, appliances, entertainment, gasoline, crude oil, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, asbestos, animal feed ingredients, chemicals, accounting, financial services, real estate, supermarkets, and sporting goods. She has also developed a test for manipulation in commodities markets, and an innovative approach for detecting conspiracies in survey data.
Dr. Abrantes-Metz authored a variety of econometric models while working for the Federal Trade Commission. Some of her research included the development of a new statistical test in the frequency domain to be applied to antitrust market definition (among other potential applications); the study of regionalization of gasoline markets and the possible asymmetric pass-through of cost shocks on retail prices. She co-developed an econometric model to study the effects of various drug characteristics on the probability of success and duration of pharmaceuticals in the FDA approval process. Dr. Abrantes-Metz also co-developed a screen for collusion based on price variance and applied it to retail gasoline markets.
Dr. Abrantes-Metz was a lecturer for undergraduate econometrics honors for several years in the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago, and a teaching assistant for graduate courses in econometrics and undergraduate courses in macroeconomics in the same department. Previously, she taught various undergraduate courses at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon Portugal, including statistics, econometrics, macroeconomics, and monetary economics.
Dr. Abrantes-Metz was responsible for research and development in finance at Banco Bozano Simonsen in Brazil, specifically studying the effects of public debt on interest rates, risk premium and default rates. At the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System she studied the welfare consequences of the European Monetary Union, research that was closely related to her dissertation Before and After the EMU: Financial Integration, Monetary Policy and Welfare Changes. | 