My research areas are Macro-Development, Innovation and Growth, and Production Linkages. I will be on the 2024-25 job market.
What's new:
In August 2024 I was a Dissertation Fellow at the St. Louis Federal Reserve
In May-July 2024 I was a Dissertation Fellow at the Federal Reserve Board
Papers
Lock-In and Productive Innovations: Implications for Firm-to-Firm Innovation Pass-Through Job Market Paper
Firms innovate to improve efficiency and reduce their costs of production (productive innovations) and to increase customer dependency through product customization (lock-in innovations).
The macroeconomic implications of lock-in innovations have been largely overlooked and this paper fills the gap.
I propose a theory of firms’ innovation that allows firms to invest in lock-in innovations by reducing product substitutability, and that nests standard models in the literature.
A key prediction of the model is that productive innovations by suppliers increase customer firms’ sales by lowering input costs; while lock-in innovations reduce customer firms’ sales by decreasing product substitutability,
making it more difficult for customers to switch to competitors. I use this theoretical insight to identify the nature of innovation in the data and calibrate the model to the U.S. economy.
I then quantitatively study the aggregate implications of lock-in and productive innovations for market power and aggregate productivity. I find that the incidence of lock-in innovations has increased significantly in the post-2000
period and that, had it remained at pre-2000 levels, aggregate productivity would have been 8% higher, average markups would have been 17% lower and markup dispersion 26% lower.
On the Investment Network and Development(online appendix)(data website)[submitted] with Julieta Caunedo STEG PhD Research Grant
Capital accumulation and the systematic reallocation of economic activity across sectors are two of the most salient features of economic development.
These two features are interconnected through the production of various types of capital and heterogeneous usage intensity across sectors, which is summarized by the investment network.
Our paper introduces the first harmonized measures of the investment network across the development spectrum and documents novel empirical regularities.
We propose a simple theory linking disparities in this network to disparities in income per capita across countries.
We show that Domar weights and the elasticity of output to sectorial productivity are nontrivial functions of the investment network and equilibrium sectorial investment rates.
For our sample of 58 countries, we show that 33% of cross-country differences in income per capita can be accounted for by disparities in the investment network.
These differences are twice as large as the role of capital in income disparities estimated through standard development accounting.
The Business Cycle Volatility Puzzle: Emerging vs Developed Economies
[submitted] with Rafael Guntin Tapan Mitra Memorial Prize for Outstanding 3rd Year Paper
We study the drivers of business cycle volatility differences between emerging and developed economies.
We develop a multisector small open economy framework with heterogeneous firms and production linkages in which firms are
subject to sectoral and firm-level TFP shocks and international prices shocks. Using sector-level, firm-level, and international
trade data from various developed and emerging economies, we quantify the relevant model-based sufficient statistics.
We find that differences in sectoral composition between emerging and developed economies can explain up to 75% of the excessive
business cycle volatility in emerging economies, while disparities in the distribution of firms account for up to 10%, and the role
of international prices shocks is negligible. Despite the significant influence of sectoral composition, the decrease in volatility
observed in emerging economies over the past four decades cannot be attributed to changes in their economic structure.
Work in Progress
Do Crisis Shape the Economic Structure? with Rafael Guntin
