Search Results
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
The Effect of Export Market Access on Labor Market Power: Firm-level Evidence from Vietnam
We examine the impact of an export market expansion created by the US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) on labor market competition among Vietnamese manufacturing firms. We measure distortionary wedges between equilibrium marginal revenue products of labor (MRPL) and wages nonparametrically and find that the median firm pays workers 59% of their MRPL. The BTA permanently decreases labor market distortion in manufacturing by 3.4%, mainly for domestic private firms. The median distortion is 26% higher for women than men, and the decline in distortion for women drives the overall ...
Working Paper
Misallocation and Intersectoral Linkages
We analytically characterize the aggregate productivity loss from allocative distortions in a setting that accounts for the sectoral linkages of production. We show that the effects of distortions and the role of sectoral linkages depend crucially on how substitutable inputs are. We find that the productivity loss is smaller if input substitutability is low. Moreover, with low input substitutability, sectoral linkages do not systematically amplify the effects of distortions. In addition, the impact of the sectors that supply intermediate inputs becomes smaller. We quantify these effects in ...
Working Paper
A Tale of Two Sectors : Why is Misallocation Higher in Services than in Manufacturing?
Recent empirical studies document that the level of resource misallocation in the service sector is significantly higher than in the manufacturing sector. We quantify the importance of this difference and study its sources. Conservative estimates for Portugal (2008) show that closing this gap, by reducing misallocation in the service sector to manufacturing levels, would boost aggregate gross output by around 12 percent and aggregate value added by around 31 percent. Differences in the effect and size of productivity shocks explain most of the gap in misallocation between manufacturing and ...
Working Paper
Misallocation in Open Economy
This paper estimates the impact of reducing export and import tariffs on firm input choices. In presence of borrowing constraints, lower export tariffs facilitate the reallocation of capital and labor inputs across firms, while a decline in import tariffs either tightens import competition or increases the availability of imported inputs; all three mechanisms suggest that a higher degree of openness should be associated with lower misallocation. To analyze the empirical relationship between openness and input misallocation, we draw on the annual surveys conducted by the Chinese National ...
Working Paper
Tax Heterogeneity and Misallocation
There is substantial asymmetry in effective corporate income tax rates across firms. While tax asymmetries would reduce productivity in frictionless economies, they can improve efficiency in a distorted economy if taxes alleviate other economic frictions. We develop a framework to estimate to what extent tax asymmetries affect productivity in distorted economies. Using US firm-level balance sheet data alongside measures of effective marginal tax rates, we find a positive correlation between tax rates and factor productivity, suggesting that tax asymmetry exacerbates the distortions from other ...
Working Paper
Capital Allocation and Productivity in South Europe
Following the introduction of the euro in 1999, countries in the South experienced large capital inflows and low productivity. We use data for manufacturing firms in Spain to document a significant increase in the dispersion of the return to capital across firms, a stable dispersion of the return to labor across firms, and a significant increase in productivity losses from misallocation over time. We develop a model of heterogeneous firms facing financial frictions and investment adjustment costs. The model generates cross-sectional and time-series patterns in size, productivity, capital ...
Working Paper
Misallocation and Productivity in the Lead Up to the Eurozone Crisis
We use Portuguese firm-level data to investigate whether changes in resource misallocation may have contributed to the poor economic performance of some southern and peripheral European countries leading up to the Eurozone crisis. We extend Hsieh and Klenow's (2009) methodology to include intermediate inputs and consider all sectors of the economy (agriculture, manufacturing, and services). We find that within-industry misallocation almost doubled between 1996 and 2011. Equalizing total factor revenue productivity across firms within an industry could have boosted valued-added 48 percent and ...
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
Exporting and Frictions in Input Markets : Evidence from Chinese Data
This paper investigates the impact of international trade on input market distortions. We focus on a specific friction, binding borrowing constraints in capital markets. We propose a theoretical model where a firm's demand for capital is constrained by an initial asset allocation and past sales. While the initial distribution of assets induces misallocation if the asset endowment at more productive firms does not fully cover their demand for capital, the dependence of the borrowing constraint from past sales proxies for cross-firm differences in the cost of default, which is empirically ...