This paper asks how rising returns to scale in production contributed to three concurrent U.S. secular trends since 1980: declining business dynamism, rising markups, and growing firm expenditures on …
PublishedJournal of Monetary EconomicsOnline 1 Apr 2026Published Apr 2026
This paper quantifies how idiosyncratic firm-level risk affects aggregate output, TFP, and firm life-cycle growth in an environment where firm productivity evolves endogenously through risky …
PublishedClassicQuarterly Journal of EconomicsPublished Nov 2009
In a monopolistic-competition model with heterogeneous firms, a plant's revenue productivity should be equalised within an industry unless the plant faces distortions -- so the dispersion of revenue …
PublishedAmerican Economic ReviewOnline 1 Jan 2026Published Jan 2026
This paper asks whether and how optimal income taxation should change when firms have market power. The question is motivated by the documented rise in economy-wide markups since 1980, which has …
PublishedJournal of Monetary EconomicsPublished Oct 2025
Standard measures of capital allocative efficiency—based on the dispersion of the average revenue product of capital (ARPK)—are severely biased when capital utilization is endogenous. When utilization …
PublishedJournal of Monetary EconomicsPublished Oct 2025
Firm-level evidence shows that recessions are characterized not just by aggregate downturns but by a sharp rise in turbulence—a reshuffling of firms' productivity rankings in which high-productivity …