In December 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a G7-led coalition of countries imposed a $60 per barrel price cap on the sales of Russian oil that use western services. This paper provides a theoretical and quantitative analysis of this new tool. We build a tractable equilibrium model...

This paper studies the effect of nonlinear pricing on markups and misallocation. We develop a general equilibrium model of firms that are allowed to set a quantity-dependent pricing schedule--contrary to the typical assumption in macroeconomic models. Without the restriction to linear pricing,...

This paper generalizes the standard habit formation model to an environment in which agents form habits over individual varieties of goods as opposed to over a composite consumption good. We refer to this preference specification as `deep habit formation'. Under deep habits, the demand function...

Firm- and plant-level empirical studies typically find that trade liberalization squeezes price-cost margins among import-competing firms, that this heightened competitive pressure induces productivity gains among these same firms, and that further efficiency gains come from market share...

We document how export quantities and prices evolve after entry to a market. Controlling for marginal cost, and taking account of selection on idiosyncratic demand, there are economically and statistically significant dynamics of quantities, but no dynamics of prices. To match these facts, we...

We formulate a medium-scale DSGE model that emphasizes a strong interplay between a roundabout production structure and a working capital channel that requires firms to borrow funds to finance the costs of all their variable inputs and not just the wage bill. Despite an absence of...

We study the gains from trade liberalization in models with monopolistic competition, firm-level heterogeneity, and variable markups. For a large class of demand functions used in the international macro and trade literature, we derive a parsimonious generalization of the welfare formula in...

Employment and hours appear far more cyclical than dictated by the behavior of productivity and consumption. This puzzle has been called "the labor wedge" -- a cyclical intratemporal wedge between the marginal product of labor and the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure. The...

This paper develops an index of allocative efficiency that depends upon the distribution of mark-ups across goods. It determines how changes in trade frictions affect allocative efficiency in an oligopoly model of international trade, decomposing the effect into the cost-change channel and the...

We study the gains from trade in a model with endogenously variable markups. We show that the pro-competitive gains from trade are large if the economy is characterized by (i) extensive misallocation, i.e., large inefficiencies associated with markups, and (ii) a weak pattern of cross-country...