|
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota.
I will be available for interviews at the 2017 Simposio de la Asociación Española de Economía (SAEe) in Barcelona (Spain), and the 2018 ASSA Meetings in Philadelphia, PA. Curriculum Vitae Job Market Paper
Fields
Primary: Macroeconomics and Labor Economics
Secondary: Applied Econometrics References
Fatih Guvenen (Main Advisor) Loukas Karabarbounis
guvenen@umn.edu loukas@umn.edu Jeremy Lise Simran Sahi (Teaching) jlise@umn.edu ssahi@umn.edu |
University of Minnesota
Department of Economics 4-101 Hanson Hall 1925 4th St S Minneapolis, MN 55455 Phone: +1 (612) 695-6142 E-mail: diezx010@umn.edu |
WORKING PAPERS
The Labor Share in the Service Economy (Job Market Paper)
Abstract: Much research has documented a decline in the aggregate labor share in the United States and other countries. Yet, I document that this is not a general phenomenon across industries. In fact, there has been a divergence between services and non-services industries in the United States since 1980. Over this period, the labor share for services industries increased by an average of 6 percentage points, whereas for the rest of industries it decreased by an average of 14 percentage points. A similar diverging pattern is also present in several European countries. By exploiting industry-level data, I find that the divergence is occurring in the large majority of sub-industries, and is correlated with changes in labor intensity across sub-industries. In order to understand the underlying mechanisms behind this divergence, I build a quantitative two-sector model and show that the decline in the aggregate labor share and the divergence across industries are both consistent with the observed declining trend in the relative price of investment goods. Critically, differences in the substitutability between capital and labor, and differences in technical change across industries can account for the divergence.
Staggered Contracts and Unemployment during the Great Recession: Evidence from Spain,
with Ernesto Villanueva
- A blog post about this paper (an early version) on Nada es Gratis (in Spanish)
with Ernesto Villanueva
- A blog post about this paper (an early version) on Nada es Gratis (in Spanish)
Abstract: We study the impact of widespread downward wage rigidity on employment flows on the onset of the Great Recession. Downward wage rigidity is due to the fact that sector-level collective agreements in Spain are automatically extended to all firms, setting wage minima for workers in the same province-industry-skill cell. We identify the impact of wage rigidity on employment because, unlike settled ones, newly bargained contracts are able to adjust to aggregate shocks. Using Social Security data and various econometric methods we find that agreements bargained after the fall of Lehman Brothers settled an average wage growth of 1.8%, while agreements signed before September 15th, 2008 settled mean wage increases of 3.1%. Among workers subject to wage rigidity, the probability of job loss between 2009 and 2010 and that being unemployed by the end of 2012 was 1% higher than among the rest. Those findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the staggering of contracts and the inability to renegotiate contracts amplify aggregate shocks.
Abstract: Top wealth inequality in the United States has increased dramatically since the 1980s. This paper documents that part of this increase relates to the rise of superstar firms. We build a novel owner-firm matched panel dataset using information from the official records of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Forbes, and Compustat. Using this data, we document that: (i) firms at the upper end of the market value distribution are disproportionately controlled by individuals at the top of the wealth distribution, (ii) these individuals invest a large fraction of their net worth in one or two main firms, which we interpret as evidence of lack of asset diversification, and (iii) the output, employment, and market value shares accounted for by these firms has increased substantially over the last 30 years.
Discretizing a Process with Non-zero Skewness and High Kurtosis,
with Simone Civale and Fatih Fazilet [online appendix] [codes]
with Simone Civale and Fatih Fazilet [online appendix] [codes]
Abstract: We develop and test a discretization method to calibrate a Markov chain that features non-zero skewness and high kurtosis. The proposed method applies the logic of Tauchen (1986) to a first-order autoregressive process with normal mixture innovations, which, as we discuss, can be calibrated to feature non-zero skewness and high kurtosis. We then illustrate an application of our method in an Aiyagari economy. We find that an idiosyncratic shock with higher kurtosis decreases the equilibrium interest rate, whereas higher left skewness increases it.
WORK IN PROGRESS
Wealth Dynamics of the Super-Rich,
with Simone Civale and Sergio Salgado (draft available upon request)
with Simone Civale and Sergio Salgado (draft available upon request)
Abstract: This paper characterizes the dynamics of wealth at the top of the distribution in the United States. Using data from the Forbes Magazine and other publicly available sources, we construct a novel panel data set of the richest individuals in the United States, covering the period 1982-2016. Using these data we find that: i) the Super-Rich exhibit a hump-shaped age profile of wealth which features explosive growth at younger ages, and ii) their wealth growth is highly cyclical, with substantial downside risk during recessions. Then, we propose a flexible enough process that captures the main features of the data.
