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Working Paper
Multinational Firms' Entry and Productivity: Some Aggregate Implications of Firm-level Heterogeneity
Despite the microeconomic evidence supporting the superior idiosyncratic productivity of multinational firms (MFN) and their affiliates, cross-country studies fail to find robust evidence of a positive relationship between Foreign Direct Investment and growth. In order to study the aggregate implications of MNF entry and production, I develop a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model with firm heterogeneity where MNF sort according to their own productivity. Entry and production of MNF contribute to aggregate productivity growth at decreasing rates over time but potentially crowd out ...
Journal Article
The Value of Loyal Customers
Is there a rational reason that stock prices in some industries greatly exceed book values? The answer may lie in the idea that customers are capital.
Discussion Paper
April Update: The Coronavirus and Firms in the Fifth Dis
Over the past several weeks, social distancing and shutdowns have impacted our economy. Fifth District firms continued to tell us how COVID-19 has affected their business operations in recent surveys.
Working Paper
Spurious seasonal patterns and excess smoothness in the BLS local area unemployment
State level unemployment statistics are some of the most important and widely used data sources for local analysts and public officials to gauge the health of their state?s economy. We find statistically significant seasonal patterns in the state level seasonally adjusted Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). We find that the pro-rata factors used in the benchmarking process can invoke spurious seasonal patterns in this data. We also find that the Henderson 13 filter used by the BLS to smooth the seasonally adjusted data may reduce ...
Working Paper
Fiscal multipliers under an interest rate peg of deterministic vs. stochastic duration
This paper revisits the size of the fiscal multiplier. The experiment is a fiscal expansion under the assumption of a pegged nominal rate of interest. We demonstrate that a quantitatively important issue is the articulation of the exit from the policy experiment. If the monetary-fiscal expansion is stochastic with a mean duration of T periods, the fiscal multiplier can be unboundedly large. However, if the monetary-fiscal expansion is for a fixed T periods, the multiplier is much smaller.
Newsletter
Has Business Fixed Investment Really Been Unusually Low?
Business fixed investment represents the spending by businesses to increase production capacity. It is traditionally decomposed into equipment (such as computers and machines), structures (such as plants, shopping malls, or warehouses), and intellectual property (such as software and R&D). After declining sharply during the Great Recession, business fixed investment (BFI) recovered in 2010, but investment was again quite low in 2015 and 2016. This slowdown was driven in part by the decline of oil prices that led to a significant contraction in the oil drilling industry. Since then, growth has ...
Journal Article
Financing business investment
Working Paper
A conversation with 590 nascent entrepreneurs
This paper summarizes interviews from 1998 with 590 individuals trying to create a business centered around five questions: ?Who are you??, ?What are you trying to accomplish??, ?What have you and others put into the business??, ?What have you accomplished??, ?What remains to be done?? There is a great deal of heterogeneity across these Nascent entrepreneurs, but they tend to have more education than the general population. Growing up in a family in which one or both parents had a business does not seem to be an important determinant of entry into entrepreneurship for males, while it seems to ...
Journal Article
Goldilocks in the corner office
The proper level of CEO compensation is more complicated than some normative sense of what the public considers fair. But with CEO pay regularly reaching eight, even nine figures, could current levels possibly be efficient? Economists can make a good theoretical case that CEO pay is inefficient, but they've had trouble pinpointing the systematic rent (pay in excess of fair market value) being extracted by CEOs. While it might not lower CEO pay, better corporate governance is likely the key to ensuring that it is tied tightly to firm performance.
Journal Article
Business financing in the defense period