Welcome! I am a PhD candidate in Economics at New York University.

I am going to be on the 2024-2025 job market.

My research interests are primarily in macroeconomics, with a focus on consumption and inequality. I have also worked on topics in information theory and spatial economics.

Here is my CV.

Contact me via jb7026@nyu.edu.

Job Market Paper

Unequal Markup Responses in Recessions
[ Draft | Slides coming soon ]

Poor and rich households differ greatly in the mix of products they consume, with the poor allocating a larger share of their expenditures to relatively inexpensive goods. Moreover, during recessions households shift spending towards more affordable goods. This paper studies an economy with nonhomothetic preferences and endogenously variable markups that can reproduce these patterns. I show that in recessions, lower-quality producers gain market power and increase markups because consumers shift spending towards more affordable goods. In contrast, higher-quality producers reduce their markups. Observed changes in the expenditure distribution during the Great Recession led to a 6.8 percentage point increase in the markups of low-quality goods and a 1.8 percentage point decline in the markups of high-quality products, thus considerably increasing real consumption inequality. Embedding this unequal markup adjustment mechanism into a Bewley-Aiyagari midek, I find that redistributive policy interventions amplify this unequal markup response. Redistribution to the poor allows lower-quality producers to gain even more market share and ito increase markups even further.

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

Quality-Uncertainty, Habit-Formation, and the Creation of New Varieties
[ Abstract | Slides ]