​Working papers

Mechanizing Agriculture  May 2022 
with Namrata Kala   
revision requested American Economic Review
An RCT that subsidizes farmers access to productive capital. Mechanization generates labor savings in stages of production that are not mechanized, and labor savings for members of the household that are mostly engaged in worker supervision. We build a theory of mechanization decisions that depend on the incidence of moral hazard in labor markets, and show that welfare gains from mechanization depend on the incidence of those frictions.
    [paper][citation]
    [slides][blog entries: econ that matters, VOXDev]

Technology and the Task Content of Jobs across the Development Spectrum January 2023
with Elisa Keller and Yongs Shin.       
Accepted for publication  WorldBank Economic Review
We harmonize two worker surveys to construct cross-country measures of task intensity across occupations. We document systematic differences in task intensity within occupations at different stages of development. We show that the decline in employment of routine intensive jobs is global, likely indicative of the global reaches of technical change.
     [paper][citation] 
     [data appendix][replication] 
     version commissioned by STEG [paper]
​
Economies of Density and Congestion in the Sharing Economy December 2022 New!
​with Hester Zhang and Namrata Kala
​submitted
The distributional and efficiency effects of government interventions in rental markets for productive capital are not well-understood. We study them and show that market mechanisms can grant access to productive capital to small-scale producer even when large-scale producers are prioritized. The reason is that small-scale producers bring density in demand and improve capacity utilization.
    [paper]
    [slides][blog entry: IGC]
                                                                                                                                                                

Publications

Occupational Exposure to Capital Embodied Technical Change  January 2023
with David Jaume ​and Elisa Keller
Forthcoming American Economic Review
First measures of capital and of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in each occupation. Despite large measured disparities in the decline in the price of capital across occupations, heterogeneity in the elasticity of substitution drives the bulk of the observed labor reallocation and shift in occupational wage premium.
   [paper][citation] 
   [slides][online appendix][replication][web with our data]
​
Technical Change and the Demand for Talent 
with Elisa Keller
Journal of Monetary Economics,  July 2022.
Carnegie-Rochester-NYU Conference Series on Public Policy.  
To what extent has technical change mitigated or exacerbated barriers to labor market reallocation faced by different demographic groups? Overall, capital-embodied technical change mitigated the impact of labor market barriers for aggregate output per worker, but it fuelled wage inequality across gender and race. 
      [paper][citation]
      [slides] [replication][web with our data]
​
Capital Obsolescence and Agricultural Productivity  
with Elisa Keller                                                                                                                        
​The Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2021.    
We build the first available measures of quality-adjusted capital stocks in agriculture across countries, exploiting prices and old and new equipment. We show that poor countries are not only less capital-intensive, but also have lower quality of capital than rich countries. Once adjusting for quality, differences in capital stocks account for almost twice as much of the agricultural labor productivity disparities across countries than previously thought. 
     [paper][citation]
     [online appendix][replication][erratum]
​     [ blog entry: focoeconomico]
​
Aggregate Fluctuations and the Industry Structure of the US Economy 
​European Economic Review,  October 2020.  
I document cyclical movements in the cost share of goods produced by investment oriented and goods oriented sectors, and show how they discipline heterogeneous elasticities of substitution in intermediate inputs across sectors. This heterogeneity increases shock amplification in the economy relative to a common elasticity framework.
​     [paper]​[citation] 
     [online appendix][replication]
​
 Who Quits Next? Firm Growth in Growing Economies  
 with  Emircan Yurdagul    
 Economic Inquiry, October 2018.
Differences in firm employment distributions are not informative of cross-country disparities in aggregate growth, while firm churning (as reflected in the age distribution) and average firm productivity are. We build a tractable theory of growth and firm dynamics and show that disparities in the probability of success in firm growth can explain two-thirds of the variation in growth. 
​       [paper] [citation]
​
Asymmetry, Complementarities and Federal Reserve Forecasts  
with Riccardo DiCecio, Ivana Komunjer, and Michael Owyang 
​Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, December 2018.
The literature has found that FED's forecast for unemployment, output and inflation are rationalizable but asymmetric along the cycle. We show that a a non-separable loss function induces symmetry in FEDs forecast for unemployment, but that there is systematic bias in the FED's forecasts for output and inflation. 
​     [paper][citation]
​

Work in progress

Capital-Embodied Structural Change, draft coming soon!
with Elisa Keller
What is the role of capital-embodied technical change (CETC) for sectorial labor reallocation and growth? We document systematic differences in CETC across sectors driven by disparities in the types of equipment used for production. CETC is slowest in agriculture, and slower in manufacturing than in services. Through a simple accounting exercise we show that CETC accounts for almost all of the shift in labor productivity in agriculture relative to manufacturing and about a third of the shifts in labor productivity in services relative to manufacturing. The passthrough between CETC and labor productivity is mediated by the capital expenditure share, which has been shifting across time within sectors. To measure the role of CETC for structural change, we build a novel model that accommodates sector-specific trends in CETC and time-varying factors shares, jointly with long-run balanced growth.

Efficiency with Equilibrium Marginal Product Dispersion and Firm Selection ​
In a variety of economies that display input misallocation and market power, welfare gains of implementing policies that do not target firm characteristics, for example, subsidies to firm entry and exit, are summarized by a single statistic: the change in average revenue total factor productivity and the number of operating units in the market.

Investment Diversification for Development 
with Lucia Casal
We study how input-output multipliers from equipment and construction shift as economies develop and interpret changes on these multipliers over time as symptom of the rewiring of the production structure. The idea of targeting investment towards industries with strong linkages to the rest of the economy goes back to Hirschmann (1958) but empirical and quantitative evidence remains elusive. We combine and harmonize data on sectoral value added, equipment imports, foreign direct investment, and input-output linkages for sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia to construct the Investment Multiplier Dataset. We then build a framework to rationalize how those multipliers change with development, and whether frictions may be dampening investment or its impact on the economy.

Hibernating

​    Industry Dynamics, Investment and Uncertainty  September 2016
​         [paper][citation]
​         [online appendix]
​​

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Discussions