In this paper, we study how the interplay between technology shocks and financial variables shapes the dynamics of economies characterized by heterogeneous agents. Most of standard economic literature has centered the analysis of decentralized economies on the representative agent hypothesis (REH), often treating short-run and long-run phenomena with distinct sets of models. However the recent ...

Existing models of financial instability tend to be based on top-down, partial-equilibrium views of markets and their interactions; they are unable to incorporate the complexity of behavior among heterogeneous firms or the tendency for all types of firms to change their behavior during a crisis. This paper argues that agent-based models (ABMs)—which seek to explain how the behavior of individua...

We present a model with agency costs where heterogeneous firms raise finance through either bank loans or corporate bonds and where banks are more efficient than the market in resolving informational problems. We document some major long-run differences in corporate finance between the United States and the euro area, and show that our model can explain those differences based on information av...

This paper develops a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms to study the interaction between technology adoption and trade in a world of two countries facing different technology adoption costs. It shows that a reduction in the technology adoption cost in one country increases the productivity, induces more firms to adopt advanced technology, and improves welfare in this count...

We develop a two-sided matching model to analyze collaboration between heterogeneous academics and firms. We predict a positive assortative matching in terms of both scientific ability and affinity for type of research, but negative assortative in terms of ability on one side and affinity in the other. In addition, the most able and most applied academics and the most able and most basic firms ...

We relate innovation to sales growth for incumbent firms in four high-tech sectors. A firm, on average, experiences only modest growth and may grow for a number of reasons that may or may not be related to ‘innovativeness’. However, given that firms are heterogeneous and that growth rates distributions are heavy-tailed, it may be misleading to use regression techniques that focus on the ‘averag...

We show that labor search frictions are an important determinant of the cross-section of equity returns. In the data, sorting firms by loadings on labor market tightness, the key statistic of search models, generates a spread in future returns of 6% annually. We propose a partial equilibrium labor market model in which heterogeneous firms make optimal employment decisions under labor search fri...

Age Structure of the Workforce and Firm Performance In this contribution, we examine the interrelation between corporate age structures and firm performance. In particular, we address the issues, whether firms with young rather than older employees are successful and whether firms with homogeneous or heterogeneous workforces are doing well. Several theoretical approaches are discussed with resp...

This paper analyzes competitive pricing policies by multiproduct firms facing heterogeneous buying patterns. We show that cross-subsidization arises when firms have comparative advantages on different products but are equally efficient overall: Firms earn a profit from multi-stop shoppers by charging positive margins on their strong products but, as price competition for one-stop shoppers drive...

This paper investigates whether exporting firms in Chinese manufacturing sector pay higher average wages than non-exporting firms by analyzing a large firm-level dataset derived from the Chinese Industrial Census in 2004. Through rigorous exercises involving robust regressions, quantile regressions and nonparametric matching estimators, we find that the wage premium of exporting activities is n...