Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stony Brook University. My research interests are primarily in macroeconomics, with a focus on inequality and firm dynamics. I also work on topics in financial economics, information theory, and spatial economics. I hold a PhD in Economics from New York University and an MSc in Financial Economics from the University of Oxford.

Here is my CV.

Contact me via jb7026@nyu.edu.

Job Market Paper

Do Poor Households Pay Higher Markups in Recessions?
(2024 Chicago Fed Rookie Conference)
[ Draft | Slides | AI-generated Short Podcast ]
Poor and rich households greatly differ in their product choices, with the poor allocating a larger share of their spending toward cheaper goods. In recessions, all households move toward cheaper goods. Using NielsenIQ micro data, I build and calibrate a model with nonhomothetic demand and oligopolistic competition that replicates these patterns. I feed observed expenditure shifts from the Great Recession and COVID-19 into this model to isolate a demand-composition channel: demand shifts toward cheaper goods weaken cross-tier competitive pressure from premium goods, increase budget-tier markups, and tilt relative prices against baskets purchased by the poor. In the Great Recession, budget-tier markups rise 5.7 pp vs 2.3 pp for premium (relative price +2.6%); in COVID-19 they move +4.3 pp vs -2.7 pp (relative price +5.3%). Bottom money-metric welfare losses exceed symmetrically deflated spending losses by 4.9 pp (Great Recession) and 4.0 pp (COVID-19); prices account for roughly 43% of the bottom’s Great Recession loss and mitigate about 10% at the top in COVID-19.

Working Papers

Local Concentration, National Concentration, and the Spatial Distribution of Markups
(with Chris Edmond, Virgiliu Midrigan, and Daniel Yi Xu) [ Draft | Slides ]
We study the spatial distribution of production and consumption in a quantitative model with multi-establishment firms, oligopolistic competition, and endogenously variable markups. We calibrate our model to match US Census of Manufactures firm and establishment data and intranational trade flows from the Commodity Flows Survey. We show that spatial frictions can have large aggregate effects, increasing both the aggregate markup and the productivity losses due to misallocation. We then show that a reduction in intranational trade costs, calibrated to match long-run trends in US manufacturing, will increase national sales concentration but decrease local sales concentration. Local markets become more competitive, markups fall, and aggregate productivity rises, despite the increase in national concentration.

Entry under Information-Frictions
(Best Third-Year Paper Award) [ Draft | Slides soon ]
I study the welfare-impact of entry-stage information frictions in the US macroeconomy. The framework for this exercise is a simple Chamberlinian model with heterogenous firms, entry-stage selection, and rigidities in capital adjustments. The severity of information frictions is governed by the precision of a private signal on firm-level fundamentals. Leveraging data on exit rates and capital adjustments among comparatively young establishments, the model is calibrated to US Census of Manufactures and BDS data. I find that a reduction of information frictions over time is consistent with a number of well-documented secular trends: a rise in concentration, an increase in profitability, as well as a decoupling of wage- and productivity-growth. The welfare-gains from a counterfactual elimination of entry-stage information frictions are roughly 10% in consumption-equivalent terms.

Work In Progress

Does a Shrinking Middle Class Lead to Higher Markups?
This paper links the well-documented rise in expenditure inequality over the past decades with the concurrent rise in markups and decline of the labor share. I make this argument using a structural model of firm dynamics with nonhomothetic consumer preferences and oligopolistic product market competition. I calibrate this model to micro data from the Nielsen Consumer Panel and I find that market power is most consequentially disciplined by comparatively price-elastic middle class consumers. A secular rise in inequality leads to a shift of consumers into both tails of the expenditure distribution and therefore a shrinking middle class. As a result, firms become less concerned about losing business from comparatively price-sensitive middle-class consumers and focus on extracting rents from their more price-insensitive customer segments. Markups rise. This secular reduction of product market competition is quantitatively consequential even when accounting for changes in the barriers to entry over time.