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
Misallocation and Credit Market Constraints: the Role of Long-Term Financing
We measure aggregate productivity loss due to credit market constraints in a model with endogenous borrowing constraints, long-duration bonds, and costly equity payouts. Due to long-duration bonds, the model generates a realistic distribution of credit spreads. We structurally estimate our model using firm-level data on credit spreads from Thomson Reuters Bond Security Data and balance sheet data from Compustat. Credit market constraints increase aggregate productivity by 0.4% through their effect on the credit spread distribution. However, credit market constraints also interact with costly ...
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
The Allocation of Immigrant Talent: Macroeconomic Implications for the U.S. and Across Countries
We quantify the labor market barriers that immigrants face, using an occupational choice model with natives and immigrants of multiple types subject to wedges that distort their allocations. We find sizable output gains from removing immigrant wedges in the U.S., representing 25% of immigrants' overall economic contribution, and that these wedges alter the impact of alternative immigration policies. We harmonize microdata across 19 economies and exploit cross-country variation in immigrant outcomes and estimated wedges to examine the drivers of differences in wedges and gains from their ...
Working Paper
Evergreening
We develop a simple model of relationship lending where lenders have incentives for evergreening loans by offering better terms to less productive and more indebted firms. We detect such lending behavior using loan-level supervisory data for the United States. Low-capitalized banks systematically distort firms’ risk assessments to window-dress their balance sheets. To avoid further reductions in their capital ratios, such banks extend relatively more credit to underreported borrowers. We incorporate the theoretical mechanism into a dynamic heterogeneous-firm model to show that evergreening ...
Working Paper
The Allocation of Immigrant Talent: Macroeconomic Implications for the U.S. and Across Countries
We quantify the barriers to the economic integration of immigrants using an occupational choice model with natives and immigrants of multiple types subject to wedges that distort their allocations. We show that key parameters, including wedges, can be estimated to match the distribution of employment and earnings across individuals and occupations. We find sizable output gains from removing immigrant wedges in the U.S., accounting for 7 percent of immigrants' overall economic contribution. These gains arise from increased labor force participation and from reallocation from manual toward ...
Working Paper
Immigrant Misallocation
We quantify the barriers that impede the integration of immigrants into foreign labor markets and investigate their aggregate implications. We develop a model of occupational choice with natives and immigrants of multiple types whose decisions are subject to wedges which distort their allocation across occupations. We estimate the model to match salient features of U.S. and cross-country individual-level data. We find that there are sizable GDP gains from removing the wedges faced by immigrants in U.S. labor markets, accounting for approximately one-fifth of the overall economic contribution ...
Report
Working hard in the wrong place: a mismatch-based explanation to the UK productivity puzzle
The UK experienced an unusually prolonged stagnation in labor productivity in the aftermath of the Great Recession. This paper analyzes the role of sectoral labor misallocation in accounting for this ?productivity puzzle.? If jobseekers disproportionately search for jobs in sectors where productivity is relatively low, hires are concentrated in the wrong sectors and the post-recession recovery in aggregate productivity can be slow. Our calculations suggest that, quantified at the level of three-digit occupations, this mechanism can explain up to two-thirds of the deviations from trend-growth ...
Working Paper
Tax Heterogeneity and Misallocation
Companies face different effective marginal tax rates on their income. This can be detrimental to allocative efficiency unless taxes offset other distortions in the economy. This paper estimates the effect of tax rate heterogeneity on aggregate productivity in distorted economies with multiple frictions. Using firm-level balance-sheet data and estimates of marginal tax rates, we find that tax heterogeneity reduces total factor productivity by about 3 percent. Our findings highlight the positive correlation between marginal tax rates and other distortions to capital and especially labor. This ...
Working Paper
The Economic Gains from Equity
How much is inequity costing us? Using a simple growth accounting framework we apply standard shift-share techniques to data from the Current Population Survey (1990-2019) to compute the aggregate economic costs of persistent educational and labor market disparities by gender and race. We find significant economic losses associated with these gaps. Building on this finding, we consider which disparities generate the largest costs, paying specific attention to differences in employment, hours worked, educational attainment, educational utilization, and occupational allocation. We also examine ...