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Working Paper
A Macroeconomic Model of Healthcare Saturation, Inequality and the Output-Pandemia Tradeoff
Covid-19 became a global health emergency when it threatened the catastrophic collapse of health systems as demand for health goods and services and their relative prices surged. Governments responded with lockdowns and increases in transfers. Empirical evidence shows that lockdowns and healthcare saturation contribute to explain the cross-country variation in GDP drops even after controlling for Covid-19 cases and mortality. We explain this output-pandemia tradeoff as resulting from a shock to subsistence health demand that is larger at higher capital utilization in a model with ...
Working Paper
Incomplete Information and Irreversible Investment
How do information frictions and investment frictions interact? We use a continuous-time model to analytically characterize how incomplete information distorts firms’ decision rules and stationary distribution when investment is irreversible. The two frictions interact in rich and substantial ways. At the firm level, noisier information shrinks a firm’s inaction region and reduces the elasticity of investment to productivity. In the aggregate, incomplete information increases steady-state capital, exacerbates capital misallocation, and mitigates the impact of productivity shocks on ...
Working Paper
Connected for Better or Worse? The Role of Production Networks in Financial Crises
We study how production networks shape the severity of Sudden Stops. We build a small open economy model with collateral constraints and input–output linkages, derive a sufficient statistic that maps network structure onto the amplification of tradable shocks, and show that a planner optimally introduces sectoral wedges to reduce amplification. Using OECD input-output data and Sudden Stop episodes, we document systematic network differences between emerging and advanced economies and show they predict crisis severity. A calibrated three-sector DSGE model disciplined by these differences ...