Working Papers

We document new facts of markup dispersion using firms in India, the US, and 10 European countries, and develop an oligopolistic model with demand elasticity shifters that accounts for the joint distribution of markups and firm size.

We show that the skewness of firm-level growth rates is robustly procyclical across the U.S. and over 60 countries, and argue that recessions combine negative mean, positive uncertainty, and negative skewness shocks.

We show that firms with high monopsony power respond less to monetary policy and that the decline in labor market power since the 1980s has amplified the output effects of monetary policy.

We prove identification of labor market models with human capital acquisition, learning, and sorting, and show that differences in learning opportunities help explain low measured sorting despite high firm-worker complementarity.

We study the interaction between minimum wages and income taxes during rising wage inequality and show that their correlation is tied to skill premia, rationalized by a model with private productivity information.

We disentangle returns to scale from TFP across firms and show that larger firms operate more scalable—but not necessarily more productive—technologies, amplifying efficiency losses from financial frictions.

We show that U.S. worker income volatility has been stable or declining since the 1950s—contradicting survey-based beliefs—and link this trend to declining firm-side volatility.

I argue that skill-biased technical change and falling capital prices explain three-quarters of the decline in U.S. entrepreneurship by raising the returns to high-skill wage employment.