This paper studies the macroeconomic implications of firm-branding activities. We show empirically that firms build market share by creating new brands, developing their existing brands, and buying established brands from other firms. Sales and prices of the underlying branded products tend to...

During the Great Moderation, macroeconomic volatility declined while firm markups increased. We document a causal relationship between volatility and markups due to tacit collusion. We exploit the legalisation of interstate banking as an exogenous decrease in volatility. Using an instrumental...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...

The protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) and the distribution of rent are central issues in R&D-based growth models with the return to innovation serving as the engine of growth. In this paper the authors consider the strength of the intellectual property rights and franchise...

This paper studies how the interplay between technological shocks and financial variables shapes the properties of macroeconomic dynamics. Most of the existing literature has based the analysis of aggregate macroeconomic regularities on the representative agent hypothesis (RAH). However, recent...

The growth of business firms is an example of a system of complex interacting units that resembles complex interacting systems in nature such as earthquakes. Remarkably, work in econophysics has provided evidence that the statistical properties of the growth of business firms follow the same...

This paper extends the Lucas (1978) model of firm formation by taking into account a normalised CES function in the production process. In a general equilibrium framework it is proved that there is an inverse relation between the value of the elasticity of substitution and average firm size....

This paper estimates a dynamic general equilibrium model of entry, exit, and endogenous productivity growth. Productivity is endogenous both at the industry level (firms enter and exit) and at the firm level (firms invest in productivity-enhancing activities). The focus of the paper is on two...

We build a novel dynamic model of two-sided markets which can be used to explore both intertemporal and cross-side pricing strategies of platform enterprise. This two-period model goes beyond the traditional two-sided market framework to examine the new intertemporal tradeoffs that a platform...

I show that corporate debt accumulation during booms can explain increases in sovereign risk during stress periods. Using idiosyncratic shocks to large firms as instruments for aggregate corporate leverage, I show that rising corporate leverage during the period 2002-2007 causally increases...