Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 21.
(refine search)
Journal Article
Industrial production and capacity utilization: the 2002 historical and annual revision
In late 2002, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System published a revision to its index of industrial production and the related measures of capacity utilization. The primary feature of the revision was the reclassification back to 1972 of production and capacity indexes for individual industries from the Standard Industrial Classification System to the North American Industry Classification System. The revision also reflects the incorporation of newly available, more comprehensive source data, and it introduced improved methods for measuring the annual real output of ...
Working Paper
International real business cycles with endogenous markup variability
The aggregate impact of decisions made at the level of the individual firm has recently attracted a lot of attention in both the macro and trade literatures. We adapt the benchmark international real business cycle model to a game-theoretic environment to add a channel for the strategic interaction among domestic and foreign firms. We show how the sum of strategic pricing decisions made at the level of the individual firm can have significant effects on the volatility and cross country co-movement of GDP and its components. Specifically we show that the addition of this one channel for ...
Report
Cost-Price Relationships in a Concentrated Economy
The US economy is at least 50 percent more concentrated today than it was in 2005. In this paper, we estimate the effect of this increase on the pass-through of cost shocks into prices. Our estimates imply that the pass-through becomes about 25 percentage points greater when there is an increase in concentration similar to the one observed since the beginning of this century. The resulting above-trend price growth lasts for about four quarters. Our findings suggest that the increase in industry concentration over the past two decades could be amplifying the inflationary pressure from current ...
Working Paper
Price Dynamics with Customer Markets
We study a tractable model of firm price setting with customer markets and empirically evaluate its predictions. Our framework captures the dynamics of customers in response to a change in the price, describes the behavior of optimal prices in the presence of customer acquisition and retention concerns, and delivers a general equilibrium model of price and customer dynamics. We exploit novel micro data on purchases from a panel of households from a large U.S. retailer to quantify the model and compare it to the counterfactual benchmark of the standard monopolistic competition setting. We show ...
Working Paper
Exchange rate pass-through, domestic competition and inflation -- evidence from the 2005/08 revaluation of the Renminbi
How important is the effect of exchange rate fluctuations on the competitive environment faced by domestic firms and the prices they charge? To answer this question, this paper examines the 17 percent appreciation of the yuan against the U.S. dollar from 2005 to 2008. In a monthly panel covering 110 sectors, a 1 percent appreciation of the Yuan increases U.S. import prices by roughly 0.8 percent. It is then shown that import prices, in turn, pass through into producer prices at an average rate of roughly 0.7, implying that a 1 percent Yuan appreciation increases the average U.S. producer ...
Working Paper
Firm Entry and Macroeconomic Dynamics: A State-level Analysis
Using an annual panel of U.S. states over the period 1982-2014, we estimate the response of macroeconomic variables to a shock to the number of new firms (startups). We find that these shocks have significant effects that persist for many years on real gross domestic product, productivity and population. This is consistent with simple models of firm dynamics where a ?missing generation? of firms affects productivity persistently.
Working Paper
Structural Change and Global Trade
Services, which are less traded than goods, rose from 58 percent of world expenditure in 1970 to 79 percent in 2015. Using a Ricardian trade model incorporating endogenous structural change, we quantify how this substantial shift in consumption has affected trade. Without structural change, we find that the world trade to GDP ratio would be 15 percentage points higher by 2015, about half the boost delivered from declining trade costs. In addition, this structural change has lowered the global welfare gains from trade integration by almost 40 percent over the past four decades. Absent further ...
Working Paper
Macroeconomic Changes with Declining Trend Inflation: Complementarity with the Superstar Firm Hypothesis
Recent studies indicate that, since 1980, the average markup and the profit share of income have increased, while the labor share and the investment share of spending have decreased. We examine the role of monetary policy in these changes as inflation has concurrently trended down. In a simple staggered price model with a non-CES aggregator of differentiated goods, a decline in trend inflation as measured since 1980 can account for a substantial portion of the changes. Moreover, introducing a rise in the productivity of “superstar firms” in the model can better explain not only the ...
Working Paper
The role of two frictions in geographic price dispersion: when market friction meets nominal rigidity
This paper empirically investigates and theoretically derives the implications of two frictions, market friction and nominal rigidity, on the dynamic properties of intra-national relative prices, with an emphasis on the interaction of the two frictions. By analyzing a panel of retail prices of 45 products for 48 cities in the U.S., we make two major arguments. First, the effect of each type of friction on the dynamics of intercity price gaps is quite different. While market frictions arising from physical distance and transportation costs contribute significantly to volatile and persistent ...
Working Paper
Externalities, Endogenous Productivity, and Poverty Traps
We present a version of the neoclassical model with an endogenous industry structure. We construct a distribution of firms? productivity that implies multiple steady-state equilibria even with an arbitrarily small degree of increasing returns to scale. While the most productive firms operate across all the steady states, in a poverty trap less productive firms operate as well. This results in lower average firm productivity and total factor productivity. The distributions of employment by firm size across steady states are consistent with the empirical observation that poor countries have a ...