James Traina
Welcome! I'm a research economist at the San Francisco Fed. I received my PhD in Financial Economics at UChicago in the summer of 2022.
I apply insights from industrial organization and corporate finance to study productivity topics, such as the structural underpinnings of investment, pricing, and financing. My current research explores how firm behavior evolves with competition and technology.
My most recent paper studies the puzzling decoupling of profit rates and factor shares from stock valuations and bond yields. We propose and offer evidence for a novel explanation: National accounts track all firms, while financial markets track public firms only. Public-firm profit rates have fallen since 1980, and implied private-firm profit rates have risen.
My dissertation investigates market power in the US manufacturing sector. The bottom line: Wage markdowns rose a lot, while price markups stayed flat at competitive levels. The microdata evidence points to technological change, not market concentration, as the key driver.