Published Papers
International Spillovers of Quality Regulations, (with Luca Macedoni).
International Economic Review, February 2025
CESifo Working Paper No. 11287
Previously circulated as "Quality Misallocation, Regulations, and Trade", CESifo Working Paper Series 9041 (April 2021)
Firm Resiliency: The Role of Spillovers, (with Meghana Ayyagari and Yuxi Cheng).
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2025.
Internet Appendix available here
SSRN Working Paper 4569288
Trade Liberalization and Chinese Students in U.S. Higher Education, (with Gaurav Khanna, Kevin Shih, Mingzhi Xu, and Miaojie Yu).
Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming)
CGD Working Paper Version (WP #536) (February 2021)
Replication Package
Quality Heterogeneity and Misallocation: The Welfare Benefits of Raising your Standards, (with Luca Macedoni)
Journal of International Economics, January 2022, 134:103544
Working Paper Version
Replication Package [Web Appendix: The CES Case] [Web Appendix: Other VES Cases] [Web Appendix: The Planner's Allocation]
Openness and Factor Shares: is Globalization Always Bad for Labor?, (with Asli Leblebicioglu).
Journal of International Economics, January 2021, 128:103406
Working Paper Version
Export Tax Rebates and Resource Misallocation: Evidence from a Large Developing Country, (with Qian Xuefeng and Mahmut Yasar).
Canadian Journal of Economics, November 2021, 54(4).
Markups and Misallocation with Evidence from Exchange Rate Shocks
Journal of Development Economics, September 2020, 146:1024-1094.
Working Paper Version
Credit and the Labor Share: Evidence from U.S. States (with Asli Leblebicioglu).
The Economic Journal, August 2020, 130: 1782–1816.
Web Appendix
Full replication files available on the EJ site
Exporter Heterogeneity and Price Discrimination: A Quantitative View (with Ina Simonovska and Jae Wook Jung).
Journal of International Economics, January 2019, 116:103-124.
Previously NBER Working Paper No. 21408.
WEB APPENDIX (See this appendix for an estimation of various models of monopolistic competition with non-homothetic preferences.)
Working Paper Version
FDI, Productivity and Country Growth: An Overview, 2009, (with Silvio Contessi).
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, 91(2):61-78.
International Economic Review, February 2025
CESifo Working Paper No. 11287
Previously circulated as "Quality Misallocation, Regulations, and Trade", CESifo Working Paper Series 9041 (April 2021)
Firm Resiliency: The Role of Spillovers, (with Meghana Ayyagari and Yuxi Cheng).
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2025.
Internet Appendix available here
SSRN Working Paper 4569288
Trade Liberalization and Chinese Students in U.S. Higher Education, (with Gaurav Khanna, Kevin Shih, Mingzhi Xu, and Miaojie Yu).
Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming)
CGD Working Paper Version (WP #536) (February 2021)
Replication Package
Quality Heterogeneity and Misallocation: The Welfare Benefits of Raising your Standards, (with Luca Macedoni)
Journal of International Economics, January 2022, 134:103544
Working Paper Version
Replication Package [Web Appendix: The CES Case] [Web Appendix: Other VES Cases] [Web Appendix: The Planner's Allocation]
Openness and Factor Shares: is Globalization Always Bad for Labor?, (with Asli Leblebicioglu).
Journal of International Economics, January 2021, 128:103406
Working Paper Version
Export Tax Rebates and Resource Misallocation: Evidence from a Large Developing Country, (with Qian Xuefeng and Mahmut Yasar).
Canadian Journal of Economics, November 2021, 54(4).
Markups and Misallocation with Evidence from Exchange Rate Shocks
Journal of Development Economics, September 2020, 146:1024-1094.
Working Paper Version
Credit and the Labor Share: Evidence from U.S. States (with Asli Leblebicioglu).
The Economic Journal, August 2020, 130: 1782–1816.
Web Appendix
Full replication files available on the EJ site
Exporter Heterogeneity and Price Discrimination: A Quantitative View (with Ina Simonovska and Jae Wook Jung).
Journal of International Economics, January 2019, 116:103-124.
Previously NBER Working Paper No. 21408.
WEB APPENDIX (See this appendix for an estimation of various models of monopolistic competition with non-homothetic preferences.)
Working Paper Version
FDI, Productivity and Country Growth: An Overview, 2009, (with Silvio Contessi).
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, 91(2):61-78.
WORKING Papers
Lobbying for Regulations: When Big Business Says Yes (with Luca Macedoni)
Do firms uniformly oppose regulations that increase production costs, or might industry leaders strategically support stricter standards as a competitive tool? We identify a specific mechanism through which regulatory advocacy serves as a non-market strategy for large firms to enhance their competitive position. By extending the Melitz-Chaney model of firm heterogeneity to incorporate both government regulations and firm lobbying, we demonstrate that regulations primarily increasing fixed costs can disproportionately burden smaller competitors while benefiting larger survivors through reduced competition. Our model predicts that firm size positively correlates with support for stringent regulations, but that larger sunk investments will push firms to oppose such policies. To test these predictions, we apply a novel guided machine learning approach to classify around 20,000 U.S. lobbying reports across diverse regulatory domains. Our findings confirm that larger firms are significantly more likely to support stricter regulations, especially in concentrated industries. We also uncover that capital-intensive firms with high leverage and less redeployable assets tend to oppose regulations, suggesting that operational flexibility is crucial for extracting strategic benefits from regulatory changes. Consistent
with our mechanism, industry exit rates increase with regulatory intensity.
Prices and Immigration: Firm-Level Evidence (with Ryan Kim and Justin Leung)
New!
This paper investigates how immigration affects consumer prices. Using scanner data and instrumenting county-level immigration with historical ancestry patterns, we find that an inflow of 10,000 immigrants lowers four-year price growth by 0.58 percentage points. Leveraging variation in firm exposure through sales versus production locations, we show price declines stem entirely from the product demand channel: firms lower prices in response to immigrants in sales markets, not production locations. Evidence suggests that immigrants search more intensively, exhibit higher demand elasticity, pay lower prices for identical products, and shift expenditure toward lower-appeal products—consistent with a model of heterogeneous price sensitivity.
Automation Under Constraints: Exchange Rates, Interest Rates, and Firm Investment (with Meghana Ayyagari, Vojislav Maksimovic, and Rodimiro Rodrigo)
New!
We study how financial constraints shape automation investment using transaction-level import records of robots and automation machinery linked to Compustat. Exploiting exogenous shocks to automation prices (yen depreciation) and financing costs (monetary policy surprises), we find financially constrained firms are roughly twice as responsive to both shocks, with price effects 45–60% larger than borrowing-cost effects. A collateral model explains this pattern: technologies like robots that bundle pledgeable hardware with non-pledgeable intangibles require internal cash for setup costs. When hardware prices fall, the binding cash constraint relaxes disproportionately for constrained firms. The results highlight how non-leverageable setup costs hinder technology diffusion, particularly among liquidity-constrained adopters.
Vertical Integration and Financial Frictions: Evidence from a Credit Market Reform (with Asli Leblebicioglu)
This paper investigates how financial development affects firms' vertical organization by examining a credit market reform in India. Using staggered implementation of Debt Recovery Tribunals (DRTs) across Indian states, we identify the causal impact of improved credit access on vertical specialization. We construct firm-level measures of vertical span-- a measure capturing the number of production stages performed within firm boundaries-- and analyze how it changes following credit market reforms. We find that firms exposed to DRT implementation significantly reduce their vertical span, increasing their reliance on outsourced inputs. Results show larger effects for bigger firms and those with greater initial input intensity, while effects are smaller for highly leveraged firms. We also show that firms are able to vertically specialize by increasing borrowing and grow their intermediate input shares after reform implementation.
Our findings reveal a novel channel through which financial development contributes to productivity and growth: by enabling vertical specialization and allowing firms to focus on their core competencies while outsourcing peripheral production stages.
Do firms uniformly oppose regulations that increase production costs, or might industry leaders strategically support stricter standards as a competitive tool? We identify a specific mechanism through which regulatory advocacy serves as a non-market strategy for large firms to enhance their competitive position. By extending the Melitz-Chaney model of firm heterogeneity to incorporate both government regulations and firm lobbying, we demonstrate that regulations primarily increasing fixed costs can disproportionately burden smaller competitors while benefiting larger survivors through reduced competition. Our model predicts that firm size positively correlates with support for stringent regulations, but that larger sunk investments will push firms to oppose such policies. To test these predictions, we apply a novel guided machine learning approach to classify around 20,000 U.S. lobbying reports across diverse regulatory domains. Our findings confirm that larger firms are significantly more likely to support stricter regulations, especially in concentrated industries. We also uncover that capital-intensive firms with high leverage and less redeployable assets tend to oppose regulations, suggesting that operational flexibility is crucial for extracting strategic benefits from regulatory changes. Consistent
with our mechanism, industry exit rates increase with regulatory intensity.
Prices and Immigration: Firm-Level Evidence (with Ryan Kim and Justin Leung)
New!
This paper investigates how immigration affects consumer prices. Using scanner data and instrumenting county-level immigration with historical ancestry patterns, we find that an inflow of 10,000 immigrants lowers four-year price growth by 0.58 percentage points. Leveraging variation in firm exposure through sales versus production locations, we show price declines stem entirely from the product demand channel: firms lower prices in response to immigrants in sales markets, not production locations. Evidence suggests that immigrants search more intensively, exhibit higher demand elasticity, pay lower prices for identical products, and shift expenditure toward lower-appeal products—consistent with a model of heterogeneous price sensitivity.
Automation Under Constraints: Exchange Rates, Interest Rates, and Firm Investment (with Meghana Ayyagari, Vojislav Maksimovic, and Rodimiro Rodrigo)
New!
We study how financial constraints shape automation investment using transaction-level import records of robots and automation machinery linked to Compustat. Exploiting exogenous shocks to automation prices (yen depreciation) and financing costs (monetary policy surprises), we find financially constrained firms are roughly twice as responsive to both shocks, with price effects 45–60% larger than borrowing-cost effects. A collateral model explains this pattern: technologies like robots that bundle pledgeable hardware with non-pledgeable intangibles require internal cash for setup costs. When hardware prices fall, the binding cash constraint relaxes disproportionately for constrained firms. The results highlight how non-leverageable setup costs hinder technology diffusion, particularly among liquidity-constrained adopters.
Vertical Integration and Financial Frictions: Evidence from a Credit Market Reform (with Asli Leblebicioglu)
This paper investigates how financial development affects firms' vertical organization by examining a credit market reform in India. Using staggered implementation of Debt Recovery Tribunals (DRTs) across Indian states, we identify the causal impact of improved credit access on vertical specialization. We construct firm-level measures of vertical span-- a measure capturing the number of production stages performed within firm boundaries-- and analyze how it changes following credit market reforms. We find that firms exposed to DRT implementation significantly reduce their vertical span, increasing their reliance on outsourced inputs. Results show larger effects for bigger firms and those with greater initial input intensity, while effects are smaller for highly leveraged firms. We also show that firms are able to vertically specialize by increasing borrowing and grow their intermediate input shares after reform implementation.
Our findings reveal a novel channel through which financial development contributes to productivity and growth: by enabling vertical specialization and allowing firms to focus on their core competencies while outsourcing peripheral production stages.
Work In Progress
Robot Adoption across the Product Life Cycle: Evidence for US Publicly Listed Firms (with Meghana Ayyagari, Vojislav Maksimovic, and Rodimiro Rodrigo)
