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Working Paper
Misallocation Costs of Digging Deeper into the Central Bank Toolkit
Central bank large-scale asset purchases, particularly the purchase of corporate bonds of nonfinancial firms, can induce a misallocation of resources through their heterogeneous effect on firms cost of capital. First, we analytically demonstrate the mechanism in a static model. We then evaluate the misallocation of resources induced by corporate bond buys and the associated output losses in a calibrated heterogeneous firm New Keynesian DSGE model. The calibrated model suggests misallocation effects from corporate bond buys can be large enough to make them less effective than government bond ...
Working Paper
Risk-Adjusted Capital Allocation and Misallocation
We develop a theory linking “misallocation,” i.e., dispersion in marginal products of capital (MPK), to macroeconomic risk. Dispersion in MPK depends on (i) heterogeneity in firm-level risk premia and (ii) the price of risk, and thus is countercyclical. We document strong empirical support for these predictions. Stock market-based measures of risk premia imply that risk considerations explain about 30% of observed MPK dispersion among US firms and rationalize a large persistent component in firm-level MPK. Risk-based MPK dispersion, although not prima facie inefficient, lowers long-run ...
Working Paper
Risk-Taking, Capital Allocation and Optimal Monetary Policy
We study the role of firm heterogeneity in affecting business cycle dynamics and optimal stabilization policy. Firms differ in their degree of cyclicality, and hence, exposure to aggregate risk, leading to firm-specific risk premia that influence resource allocations. The heterogeneous firm economy can be recast in a representative firm formulation, but where total factor productivity (TFP) is endogenous and depends on the resource allocation. The model uncovers a novel tradeoff between the long-run level and volatility of TFP. Inefficiencies distort this tradeoff and result in either ...
Working Paper
Accounting for Productivity Dispersion over the Business Cycle
This paper presents accounting decompositions of changes in aggregate labor and capital productivity. Our simplest decomposition breaks changes in an aggregate productivity ratio into two components: A mean component, which captures common changes to firm factor productivity ratios, and a dispersion component, which captures changes in the variance and higher order moments of their distribution. In standard models with heterogeneous firms and frictions to firm input decisions, the dispersion component is a function of changes in the second and higher moments of the log of marginal revenue ...
Working Paper
International Diversification, Reallocation, and the Labor Share
How does growing international financial diversification affect firm-level and aggregate labor shares? We study this question using a novel framework of firm labor choice in the face of aggregate risk. The theory implies a cross-section of labor risk premia and labor shares that appear as markups in firm-level data. International risk sharing leads to a reallocation of labor towards riskier/low labor share firms alongside a rise in within-firm labor shares, matching key micro-level facts. We use cross-country firm-level data to document a number of empirical patterns consistent with the ...
Working Paper
Aggregate Implications of Deviations from Modigliani-Miller: A Sufficient Statistics Approach
A few sufficient statistics can identify the aggregate effects of distortions to firm investment in a class of general equilibrium models that can accommodate rich general equilibrium effects including endogenous firm entry. This result does not depend on the microfoundation of the distortion; one can generate inferences about aggregate effects that apply for multiple microfoundations or in cases where a fully specified model is difficult to solve. To demonstrate the relevance of themethodology, we use it to quantify the aggregate consequences of costly external equity financing and a ...