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 universally oppose regulations that raise production costs, or do their stances depend on intrinsic characteristics that create uneven outcomes across businesses? This question is vital for understanding firms’ behavior in regulatory lobbying. We extend a standard general equilibrium model with firm heterogeneity in productivity by incorporating two key elements: (1) governments can impose regulations, and (2) firms can lobby for either stricter or more lenient regulations. While regulations aim to address consumption externalities, they also raise both marginal and fixed production costs. This can drive less productive firms out of the market, and leave surviving firms potentially better off. Our model shows that large firms are likely to lobby for stricter regulations when these regulations primarily increase fixed costs. To test these predictions, we use a guided machine learning algorithm to classify US firms’ positions on regulatory issues based on their lobbying reports. Our findings reveal that larger firms, particularly in concentrated industries, tend to support more stringent regulations. Additionally, we identify a negative relationship between capital intensity, leverage, and regulatory support, suggesting that a firm's operational flexibility plays a key role in shaping its stance on regulatory changes.
Prices and Immigration (with Ryan Kim and Justin Leung)
New draft coming soon!
While a large number of papers study the immigration inflow on labor market outcomes, studying the general equilibrium effect on prices and corresponding implications on real wages (and welfare) is scarce. There are three challenges. First, the immigration inflow is endogenous. Second, the immigration inflow affects prices through both increased product demand and increased labor supply. Third, the immigration inflow affects variety and quality, which are known to be of first-order importance in measuring the price index. We overcome these three challenges by using unique micro-level data that links barcode-level prices with the location of production, and identify immigration shocks at the supply and demand locations using an IV method at the frontier of the literature (Terry et al. 2024).
Vertical Integration and Financial Frictions (with Asli Leblebicioglu)
New draft coming soon!
We study a firms’ re-organization of production following an improvement in the efficiency of credit markets. A channel through which firm organization affects productivity is the Vertical Span of inputs that plants decide to produce “in-house” (Boehm and Oberfield, 2020). The vertical span captures the number of sequential production steps performed by the plant to produce their product. Credit constraints can distort production and sourcing decisions as they impede the firms’ use of external finance to source their inputs. Hence, a reduction in financial frictions can raise productivity through a change in the vertical span of production of the firm. In this paper we construct a measure of vertical span for Indian firms using data from the CMIE, which provides detailed information on both inputs and output of a panel of firms. To examine the effect of financial development on vertical span of production, we employ a difference-in-differences research design, where we consider an Indian judicial reform—establishment of Debt Recovery Tribunals— as the exogeneous credit supply shock. This reform, which increased banks’ ability to recover nonperforming loans, was introduced in a staggered manner across states. We find that firms in those states reduced their vertical span, implying that they produced inputs in-house that were closer to their output, and sourced more inputs that were further upstream. Consistently, plants outsourced a larger variety of inputs and the input share of total costs increased.
Do firms universally oppose regulations that raise production costs, or do their stances depend on intrinsic characteristics that create uneven outcomes across businesses? This question is vital for understanding firms’ behavior in regulatory lobbying. We extend a standard general equilibrium model with firm heterogeneity in productivity by incorporating two key elements: (1) governments can impose regulations, and (2) firms can lobby for either stricter or more lenient regulations. While regulations aim to address consumption externalities, they also raise both marginal and fixed production costs. This can drive less productive firms out of the market, and leave surviving firms potentially better off. Our model shows that large firms are likely to lobby for stricter regulations when these regulations primarily increase fixed costs. To test these predictions, we use a guided machine learning algorithm to classify US firms’ positions on regulatory issues based on their lobbying reports. Our findings reveal that larger firms, particularly in concentrated industries, tend to support more stringent regulations. Additionally, we identify a negative relationship between capital intensity, leverage, and regulatory support, suggesting that a firm's operational flexibility plays a key role in shaping its stance on regulatory changes.
Prices and Immigration (with Ryan Kim and Justin Leung)
New draft coming soon!
While a large number of papers study the immigration inflow on labor market outcomes, studying the general equilibrium effect on prices and corresponding implications on real wages (and welfare) is scarce. There are three challenges. First, the immigration inflow is endogenous. Second, the immigration inflow affects prices through both increased product demand and increased labor supply. Third, the immigration inflow affects variety and quality, which are known to be of first-order importance in measuring the price index. We overcome these three challenges by using unique micro-level data that links barcode-level prices with the location of production, and identify immigration shocks at the supply and demand locations using an IV method at the frontier of the literature (Terry et al. 2024).
Vertical Integration and Financial Frictions (with Asli Leblebicioglu)
New draft coming soon!
We study a firms’ re-organization of production following an improvement in the efficiency of credit markets. A channel through which firm organization affects productivity is the Vertical Span of inputs that plants decide to produce “in-house” (Boehm and Oberfield, 2020). The vertical span captures the number of sequential production steps performed by the plant to produce their product. Credit constraints can distort production and sourcing decisions as they impede the firms’ use of external finance to source their inputs. Hence, a reduction in financial frictions can raise productivity through a change in the vertical span of production of the firm. In this paper we construct a measure of vertical span for Indian firms using data from the CMIE, which provides detailed information on both inputs and output of a panel of firms. To examine the effect of financial development on vertical span of production, we employ a difference-in-differences research design, where we consider an Indian judicial reform—establishment of Debt Recovery Tribunals— as the exogeneous credit supply shock. This reform, which increased banks’ ability to recover nonperforming loans, was introduced in a staggered manner across states. We find that firms in those states reduced their vertical span, implying that they produced inputs in-house that were closer to their output, and sourced more inputs that were further upstream. Consistently, plants outsourced a larger variety of inputs and the input share of total costs increased.
Work In Progress
Robot Adoption across the Product Life Cycle: Evidence for US Publicly Listed Firms
(with Meghana Ayyagari and Rodimiro Rodrigo)
