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Essays on Macroeconomics.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Essays on Macroeconomics./
Author:	Wang, Yajie.
Description:	1 online resource (175 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-11, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International84-11A.
Subject:	Finance. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798379523367

Essays on Macroeconomics.
Wang, Yajie.

Essays on Macroeconomics. - 1 online resource (175 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-11, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Rochester, 2023.

Includes bibliographical references

This dissertation consists of two essays on macroeconomics. Each chapter uses both empirical and quantitative methods to answer macroeconomic questions. In the first chapter, I build a novel search model to study how uncertainty shocks to firm-level productivity affect unemployment. The model's core is a labor contracting friction that implies wages are insensitive to transitory firm-level idiosyncratic shocks. When this interacts with a firm financial friction, wage bills become debt-like commitments by firms to workers, which firms are less likely to take on when high uncertainty raises firm default risks. As firms hire fewer workers, unemployment increases. Quantitatively, I find that the average peak-to-trough increase in unemployment during recessions implied by my baseline model is about the same as that in the data. The model's ability to capture unemployment dynamics diminishes markedly if I eliminate any of three elements: the financial friction, the labor contracting friction, or uncertainty shocks. My model also suggests that the labor market policy of subsidizing firms' wage bills performs better than increasing unemployment benefits during periods of elevated uncertainty.The second chapter studies how the development of automation technology affects industry concentration. Using industry-level data, we present evidence that the rise in automation technology contributed to the rise of superstar firms in the past two decades. We explain the empirical link between automation and industry concentration in a general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms and variable markups. A firm can operate a labor-only technology or, by paying a per-period fixed cost, an automation technology that uses both workers and robots as inputs. Given the fixed cost, more productive and larger firms are more likely to automate. Increased automation boosts labor productivity, enabling large, robot-using firms to expand further, which raises industry concentration. Our calibrated model does well in matching the highly skewed usage of automation toward a few superstar firms observed in the Census data. Since robots substitute for labor, increased automation raises sales concentration more than employment concentration, also consistent with empirical evidence. A modest subsidy for automating firms improves welfare since productivity gains outweigh increased markup distortions.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798379523367Subjects--Topical Terms:

559073
Finance.
Subjects--Index Terms:

MacroeconomicsIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Essays on Macroeconomics.
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502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Rochester, 2023.
504 $a Includes bibliographical references
520 $a This dissertation consists of two essays on macroeconomics. Each chapter uses both empirical and quantitative methods to answer macroeconomic questions. In the first chapter, I build a novel search model to study how uncertainty shocks to firm-level productivity affect unemployment. The model's core is a labor contracting friction that implies wages are insensitive to transitory firm-level idiosyncratic shocks. When this interacts with a firm financial friction, wage bills become debt-like commitments by firms to workers, which firms are less likely to take on when high uncertainty raises firm default risks. As firms hire fewer workers, unemployment increases. Quantitatively, I find that the average peak-to-trough increase in unemployment during recessions implied by my baseline model is about the same as that in the data. The model's ability to capture unemployment dynamics diminishes markedly if I eliminate any of three elements: the financial friction, the labor contracting friction, or uncertainty shocks. My model also suggests that the labor market policy of subsidizing firms' wage bills performs better than increasing unemployment benefits during periods of elevated uncertainty.The second chapter studies how the development of automation technology affects industry concentration. Using industry-level data, we present evidence that the rise in automation technology contributed to the rise of superstar firms in the past two decades. We explain the empirical link between automation and industry concentration in a general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms and variable markups. A firm can operate a labor-only technology or, by paying a per-period fixed cost, an automation technology that uses both workers and robots as inputs. Given the fixed cost, more productive and larger firms are more likely to automate. Increased automation boosts labor productivity, enabling large, robot-using firms to expand further, which raises industry concentration. Our calibrated model does well in matching the highly skewed usage of automation toward a few superstar firms observed in the Census data. Since robots substitute for labor, increased automation raises sales concentration more than employment concentration, also consistent with empirical evidence. A modest subsidy for automating firms improves welfare since productivity gains outweigh increased markup distortions.
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