Research

This page brings forward earlier academic research from my PhD-era economics site. For more recent applied work, the portfolio also includes posts, publications, and technical briefings elsewhere on the site.

Working Papers

Firm Dynamics with Firm-specific Intangible Capital

This paper studies simple models of firm investment under uncertainty, which often lack an internal mechanism that propagates shocks. It introduces a time-to-build feature in firm-specific intangible investment to generate internal propagation. Because this intangible capital is firm-specific, there is no market for trading it across firms, so firms must produce it internally over time using factor inputs. Firms with a higher intangible share exhibit a more hump-shaped impulse response and a more delayed peak even without explicitly adding adjustment-cost terms. In this setting, internal intangible capital accumulation becomes a real friction, a micro-foundation for adjustment costs, and a Q-theory-style mechanism for firm investment. The model also introduces a time-varying wedge between factor prices and marginal products, with the degree of firm-specificity determining the size of the wedges.

Price-setting under Bounded Rationality

I present a theoretical model in which price-setting firms choose what to pay attention to and how much attention to allocate, subject to cognitive limits, in a sparsity-based bounded-rationality setting in the spirit of Gabaix (2014). Unlike rational inattention models such as Sims (2003), where firms reset prices every period with a fixed amount of attention, this framework allows prices to remain unchanged for a time even when adjustment is physically costless, and it allows attention to vary across conditions. Inaction arises when both aggregate and idiosyncratic conditions move little enough that firms allocate zero attention to them. Firms allocate more attention to conditions that are more variable. The model qualitatively matches micro price data in which prices respond quickly and strongly to idiosyncratic shocks but only slowly and modestly to nominal shocks. It also implies that nominal shocks can have strong and persistent real effects when aggregate uncertainty is sufficiently low.

Research Areas

  • Firm dynamics
  • Macroeconomics
  • Asset pricing
  • Natural language processing in economics and finance