Working Papers

"Digital Platform Acquisitions and Growth," with Federico Puglisi and Liangjie Wu  (new draft coming soon)

This paper develops an endogenous growth model of consumption through a platform. In equilibrium the platform owns some of the products in the economy and the rest are operated by standalone firms. The platform chooses how much of its appeal to share with the standalone firms (‘’product tying”), balancing the incentive to privilege its own products against the desire to attract users to the platform. Acquisitions of standalone firms allow the platform to expand its offerings which lowers the cost of tying. In the data, most acquisitions by Big Tech are cross industry and households allocate a significant amount of time to using online platforms. We use the model to study the effects of acquisitions and product tying on entry, platform usage, and welfare. 

"Market Concentration and the Productivity Slowdown," (Revise & Resubmit, Review of Economic Studies)

Since around 2000, U.S. aggregate productivity growth has slowed and product market concentration has risen. To explain these facts, I construct a measure of innovativeness based on patents that is comparable across firms and over time and show that small firms make innovations that are more incremental in the 2000s compared to the 1990s. I develop an endogenous growth model where the quality of new ideas is heterogeneous across firms to analyze the implications of this finding. I use a quantitative version of the model to infer changes to the structure of the U.S. economy between the 1990s and the 2000s. This analysis suggests that declining innovativeness of smaller firms can account for the bulk of the rise in market concentration and the productivity slowdown. Strategic changes in firms’ R&D investment policies in response to the decreased likelihood of laggards making drastic improvements significantly amplify the productivity slowdown.

"This Time It’s Different: The Role of Women’s Employment in a Pandemic Recession," with Titan Alon, Matthias Doepke, and Michèle Tertilt, NBER Working Paper 27660

In recent US recessions, employment losses have been much larger for men than for women. In the current recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic the opposite is true: unemployment is higher among women. In this paper, we analyze the causes and consequences of this phenomenon. We argue that women experience sharp employment losses in part because women's employment is concentrated in heavily affected sectors such as restaurants, but also because increased childcare needs due to school and daycare closures prevent many women from working. We analyze the repercussions of these facts using a quantitative macroeconomic model featuring heterogeneity in gender, marital status, childcare needs, and human capital. Our quantitative analysis suggests that a pandemic recession will i) feature a strong transmission from employment to aggregate demand due to diminished within-household insurance; ii) result in a widening of the gender wage gap throughout the recovery; iii) contribute to a weakening of gender  norms that currently lead to a lopsided distribution of the division of labor in home work and child care.

Media coverage: Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Planet Money, New York Times, CNN, BBC,  Quartz, Forbes, Bloomberg, NPR, The Economist; video interview with PBS' To the Contrary; radio interview with WBEZ

"Country Banks and the Panic of 1825" 

The Panic of 1825 was one of the world's first international financial crises. In this paper, I document how this crisis spread from London banks to England's real economy. England's correspondent banking network propagated trouble in sovereign debt markets to small banks outside of London and ultimately to non-financial firms. Using exogenous variation in town-level exposure to the crisis, I show that bank failures led to a substantial number of bankruptcies among non-financial firms, particularly in non-tradable sectors. These findings highlight the costs of a disruption to the payment system: country bank notes were the primary means of payment during the first industrial revolution. 

Works in Progress

"Historical Measures of Market Concentration" with Enrico Berkes, Carola Frydman, Amy Handlan, Mark (Zhenzhi) He and Dimitris Papanikolaou

We study the evolution of market concentration in U.S. industries between 1905 and 1924 using newly digitized data on company balance sheets and income statements from the Babson's company manuals. 

"Changing Preferences of Married Women and the Gender Wage Gap," with Titan Alon and Sena Coskun

We study the evolving sectoral preferences of married and single U.S. women. The decomposition reveals significant differences between the two groups in sorting across industries and over time, particularly since the 1990s. While occupational sorting has converged, sectoral sorting has diverged. Married women show an increasing preference for safe industries. We construct a hypothetical gender wage gap assuming women share the preferences of men and face the same discrimination and find that falling discrimination against women was the key determinant closing the gender wage gap until the 1990s, while changing preferences of married women are responsible for further closing the gender wage gap since then. 

Publications

"The Impact of COVID-19 on Gender Equality," with Titan Alon, Matthias Doepke, and Michèle Tertilt, Covid Economics: Vetted and Real-Time Papers, Issue 4, 62-85, April 2020. 

Short version: VoxEU 

"How Effective Are Macroprudential Policies? An Empirical Investigation," with Ozge Akinci, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Volume 33, p. 33-57, January 2018. 

Non-Refereed Publications

"Comment on Understanding the Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Women by Claudia Goldin," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2022: 126-135. 

Older Working Papers

"Sector-Specific Shocks and the Expenditure Elasticity Channel During the COVID-19 Crisis," with Ana Danieli, May 2020