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Understanding international prices: customers as capital
This paper develops a theory of pricing-to-market driven by marketing and bargaining frictions. Our key innovation is a capital theoretic model of marketing in which relations with customers are valuable. In our model, producers search and form long-lasting relations with their customers, and marketing helps overcome the search frictions involved in forming such matches. In the context of international business cycle patterns, the model accounts for observations that are puzzles for a large class of theories: (i) pricing-to-market, (ii) positive correlation of aggregate real export and import ...
Journal Article
The Policy Perils of Low Interest Rates
Well before central banks slashed rates to fight the Great Recession, long-term market rates began slipping. With no reversal in sight, will policymakers lose their main recession-fighting tool?
Journal Article
Why Credit Cards Played a Surprisingly Big Role in the Great Recession
Lukasz Drozd examines the links between zero-APR credit card offers and the Great Recession’s persistent declines in employment and output.
Journal Article
Generative AI: A Turning Point for Labor’s Share?
Thanks to artificial intelligence, labor’s share of national income may no longer hold steady.
Working Paper
Pricing-to-Market in Business Cycle Models
We evaluate several leading microfounded pricing-to-market (PTM) mechanisms embedded in a two-country DSGE model with volatile exchange rates driven by real and financial shocks. Across these frameworks, including the reduced-form Kimball specification, we identify a fundamental parameterization trilemma: Models typically struggle to simultaneously match empirically plausible producer markups, muted expenditure switching (low short-run trade elasticity), and the low exchange-rate pass-through needed to account for the business-cycle dynamics of prices and quantities. We provide an analytical ...
Working Paper
Long-Run Trade Elasticity and the Trade-Comovement Puzzle
We show that the trade-comovement puzzle - theory's failure to account for the positive relation between trade and business cycle synchronization - is intimately related to its counterfactual implication that short- and long-run trade elasticities are equal. Based on this insight, we show that modeling the disconnect between the low short- and the high long-run trade elasticity in consistency with the data is promising in resolving the puzzle. In a broader context, our findings are relevant for analyzing business cycle transmission in a large class of models and caution against the use of ...
Working Paper
Credit Enforcement Cycles
Empirical evidence suggests that widespread financial distress, by disrupting enforcement of credit contracts, can be self-propagatory and adversely affect the supply of credit. We propose a unifying theory that models the interplay between enforcement, borrower default decisions, and the provision of credit. The central tenets of our framework are the presence of capacity constrained enforcement and borrower heterogeneity. We show that, despite heterogeneity, borrowers tend to coordinate their default choices, leading to fragility and to credit rationing. Our model provides a rationale for ...
Working Paper
Modeling the Revolving Revolution: The Debt Collection Channel
We investigate the role of information technology (IT) in the collection of delinquent consumer debt. We argue that the widespread adoption of IT by the debt collection industry in the 1990s contributed to the observed expansion of unsecured risky lending such as credit cards. Our model stresses the importance of delinquency and private information about borrower solvency. The prevalence of delinquency implies that the costs of debt collection must be borne by lenders to sustain incentives to repay debt. IT mitigates informational asymmetries, allowing lenders to concentrate collection ...
Working Paper
Financial contracting with enforcement externalities
Contract enforceability in financial markets often depends on the aggregate actions of agents. For example, high default rates in credit markets can delay legal enforcement or reduce the value of collateral, incentivizing even more defaults and potentially affecting credit supply. We develop a theory of credit provision in which enforceability of individual contracts is linked to aggregate behavior. The central element behind this link is enforcement capacity, which is endogenously determined by investments in enforcement infrastructure. Our paper sheds new light on the emergence of credit ...
Working Paper
Modeling the credit card revolution: the role of debt collection and informal bankruptcy
In the data, most consumer defaults on unsecured credit are informal and the lending industry devotes significant resources to debt collection. We develop a new theory of credit card lending that takes these two features into account. The two key elements of our model are moral hazard and costly state verification that relies on the use of information technology. We show that the model gives rise to a novel channel through which IT progress can affect outcomes in the credit markets, and argue that this channel can be critical to understand the trends associated with the rapid expansion of ...