Whether openness to trade can be expected to reduce or exacerbate the equilibrium exposure of real income to productivity shocks remains theoretically ambiguous and empirically unclear. In this paper we exploit the expansion of railroads across India between 1861 to 1930—a setting in which agricultural technologies were rain-fed and risky, and regional famines were commonplace—to examine whethe...

I characterize cyclical fluctuations in the cross-sectional dispersion of firm-level productivity. Using the micro-estimated dispersion, or “risk,” stochastic process as an input to a baseline DSGE financial accelerator model, I assess how well the model reproduces cyclical movements in both real and financial conditions of the economy. In the model, risk shocks calibrated to micro data lead to...

We investigate the role of permanent and transitory shocks for firms and aggregate dynamics. We find that permanent shocks to productivity and permanent shifts in the composition of output explain at least 4/5 of firms dynamics. However, these permanent shocks are almost uncorrelated across firms, and are therefore less relevant for aggregate dynamics. Transitory shocks, on the other hand, are ...

This paper shows that productivity shocks to the top 100 U.S. companies (as identified in Gabaix (2011)) contain systematic information. Specifically, shocks to the top 100 firms predict future shocks to geographically close firms. Intra-sector trade links are an important economic channel for the cascade effect. However, these geographic spillovers are not only restricted to firms’ explicit in...

This paper presents and estimates a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which labor reallocations between production and organizational tasks and endogenous movements in measured TFP serve as an ampli…cation mechanism in business cycles. In our model, the organizational tasks are related to accumulation of organizational capital which enhances the …nancial relationships between …rms...

This paper represents a contribution to the study of the international transmission of business cycle shocks. A domestic positive productivity shock hitting countries vis-à-vis the rest of the world is identified in a VAR model following the methodology of sign restriction pioneered by Canova and De Nicolò in 2002. By this identification strategy, restrictions are imposed on impulse response fu...

This paper extends the indivisible-labor model by Hansen [J. Monet. Econ. 16 (1985) 309] and Rogerson [J. Monet. Econ. 21 (1988) 3] to include multiple consumers who differ in initial wealth and whose labor productivities are subject to idiosyncratic shocks. In the presence of idiosyncratic uncertainty, the optimal allocations for the individual employment probabilities are at corners: agents w...

Agricultural labor productivity is key for understanding aggregate cross-country income differences. One important proximate cause of low agricultural productivity is the low use of intermediate inputs, such as fertilizers, in developing countries. This paper argues that farmers in poor countries rationally choose to use fewer intermediate inputs because it limits their exposure to large uninsu...

This paper asks to which extent productivity shocks may account for real exchange rate and trade balance developments in the US in the second half of the 1990s. The analysis is based on a version GEM calibrated to analyze macroeconomic interdependence between the US and the rest of the world. The paper concludes that the Balassa-Samuelson effect of a permanent productivity shock in the tradable...