Essays on International Macroeconomics, Productivity Growth, and Firm Dynamics
Author | : Xiaomei Sui |
Publisher | : |
Total Pages | : 0 |
Release | : 2023 |
ISBN-10 | : OCLC:1385405674 |
ISBN-13 | : |
Rating | : 4/5 (74 Downloads) |
Download or read book Essays on International Macroeconomics, Productivity Growth, and Firm Dynamics written by Xiaomei Sui and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation consists of essays studying how macroeconomic outcomes, particularly aggregate productivity growth, are affected by the change in market environment or market frictions in the presence of heterogeneous firms from an international perspective. Each chapter employs both empirical and quantitative macroeconomic methods. The first chapter studies how globalization contributes to uneven firm growth and its implications for industrial concentration and productivity growth in OECD countries. I document new facts showing that industry leaders grow faster in sales and patenting than followers, particularly in industries with increasing export intensities; sales divergence is mainly driven by exports rather than domestic sales. To rationalize these facts, I develop a two-country endogenous growth model with strategic domestic and international competition and an 'innovation disadvantage of backwardness' that captures how firms innovate less when left behind. Globalization, modelled as decreasing trade iceberg costs and increasing international knowledge spillovers, triggers a stronger innovation response among leaders than followers via the market size effect, inducing an increase in domestic concentration that depresses firm innovation via weaker domestic competition: followers and leaders reduce innovation due to the innovation dis-advantage of backwardness and decreasing returns to innovation, respectively. The globalization-induced harsher foreign competition also reduces innovation via lower profits. In the calibrated model, globalization explains 80% of the rise in industrial concentration and 50% of the productivity growth slowdown in the data, mainly due to weaker domestic competition. The increasing international knowledge spillover force of globalization dominates. The second chapter studies how the less-developed financial market in Southern European countries contributes to their slower aggregate productivity growth than developed European countries since the information and communications technology revolution. I document that Southern European firms have lower productivity growth, lower intangible capital growth, and lower leverage than developed European firms. The disparity is larger among smaller firms. To rationalize these findings, I build a model featuring endogenous firm productivity growth through innovation investment and size-dependent financial frictions. Financial frictions lower productivity growth via two channels: innovation investment and misallocation. The model finds that financial frictions account for at least 11% of the aggregate productivity growth difference in the data, mainly via the innovation investment channel. The model also highlights that fast capital and output growth may coexist with slow productivity growth due to firms' tradeoffs in allocating a constrained amount of investment between capital and productivity."--Pages viii-ix.