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 2014 I was a Dissertation Fellow at the St. Louis Federal Reserve
In May-July 2014 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
In this paper I study the macroeconomic implications of productive versus lock-in innovations, focusing on their pass-through effects between supplier and customer firms.
Firms innovate not only to improve productivity but also to differentiate their products, locking in customers by making it harder to substitute away from them.
The aggregate effects of these innovations arise from both their direct impact on value added and their indirect effects through firm linkages.
While much of the literature has focused on productivity-enhancing innovations, lock-in innovations have been overlooked. I develop a structural model in which customer firms use a CRESH
technology with time-varying, supplier-specific substitutability. Supplier firms,compete oligopolistically and are heterogeneous in productivity and product substitutability, making their
markups endogenous to both factors. Suppliers invest in either productive innovations that boost efficiency or lock-in innovations that reduce substitutability.
To identify these innovations in the data, I use a model-based implication: productive innovations raise customer firms' sales growth, while lock-in innovations reduce it.
Using U.S. supplier-customer linkages, balance sheet data, and stock market returns on innovations, I run local projections to study customer sales responses to supplier innovations, considering supplier market power.
The results show that low-markup supplier innovations increase customer sales, while high-markup innovations decrease it. Additionally, I document that high-markup suppliers increase product uniqueness through their innovations.
I use these findings to identify the type of innovations and calibrate the model to quantify the aggregate implications of lock-in innovations on TFP and Welfare.
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
