Yasutaka Koike

Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from UCLA and previously worked as an economist at the Bank of Japan.

My research interests are macroeconomics, international trade, and network economics. I work on firm heterogeneity with a focus on firm-to-firm transaction networks, misallocation, and growth, as well as welfare and inflation measurement under income- and wealth-dependent preferences.

Fall 2026 — I will be visiting the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Upcoming talks — The Economics of Production Networks Conference (Honolulu) · University of Virginia · SEA Annual Meeting (Houston) · Georgetown University

Publications

Measuring Welfare by Matching Households Across Time

with David Baqaee and Ariel Burstein · Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2024 · PDF ·

Abstract

The money metric utility function is an essential tool for calculating welfare-relevant growth and inflation. We show how to recover it from repeated cross-sectional data without making parametric assumptions about preferences. We do this by solving the following recursive problem. Given compensated demand, we construct money metric utility by integration. Given money metric utility, we construct compensated demand by matching households over time whose money metric utility value is the same. We illustrate our method using household consumption survey data from the United Kingdom from 1974 to 2017 and find that real consumption calculated using official aggregate inflation statistics overstates money metric utility in 1974 pounds for the poorest households by around half a percent per year and understates it by around a third of a percentage point per year for the richest households. We extend our method to allow for missing or mismeasured prices, assuming preferences are separable between goods with well-measured prices and the rest. We discuss how our results change if the prices of some service sectors are mismeasured.

Working Papers

Aggregating Distortions in Networks with Multi-Product Firms

with Antonio Martner · PDF ·

Abstract

We investigate the role of multiproduct firms in shaping resource misallocation and its impact on aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Using administrative data on product transactions between all formal Chilean firms, we provide evidence that demand shocks to one product affect the production of other products within the same firm, suggesting that firms engage in joint production. We develop a framework to measure resource misallocation in production networks with joint production, deriving sufficient statistics to quantify these effects. Applying the framework to a period of negative TFP growth in Chile, we find that the standard single-product benchmark attributes a 14.1% decline to allocative efficiency. Accounting for joint production reduces this measured decline to 10.1%. Ignoring joint production therefore overestimates the decline in allocative efficiency by 40% relative to the joint-production estimate.

Sufficient Statistics for Measuring Forward-Looking Welfare

with David Baqaee and Ariel Burstein · PDF ·

Abstract

We provide a method to measure welfare in money-metric terms, accounting for future expectations. Our approach relies on two key assumptions: (1) separability of the expenditure function between present and future, and (2) existence of households without idiosyncratic undiversifiable risk. We infer expectations about the future from observed consumption-savings choices of this subset of households. Our sufficient statistics methodology accommodates incomplete markets, lifecycle motives, non-rational expectations, non-exponential time discounting, and arbitrary functional forms. Application requires estimates of the intertemporal substitution elasticity, price changes over time, and repeated cross-sectional data on household income, balance sheets, and expenditures. Using PSID data from the United States, we find that static measures overstate cost-of-living increases, especially for younger and poorer households. Our estimates can be used to study the welfare consequences of dynamic stochastic shocks that affect households along different margins and time horizons.

The Anatomy of Aggregate Productivity

with Federico Huneeus and Antonio Martner · PDF ·

Abstract

We present an aggregation result that structurally dissects the drivers of aggregate productivity, i.e., technology and the reallocation of resources, across arbitrary parts of the economy using sufficient statistics that can be measured with standard datasets. Besides the typical statistics of factor shares and distortion changes, consumption share changes emerge as a new sufficient statistics that capture an income redistribution channel between households. This channel reflects how changes in households’ income propagate upstream, influencing the allocation of resources across firms. We apply our results to revisit Chile’s aggregate productivity stagnation since 2010, leveraging two decades of administrative firm-to-firm data. This stagnation is almost entirely driven by the reallocation of resources and in particular by expenditure changes of specific groups of the economy. Exports of mining, domestic output of manufacturing and retail, and incumbent large firms shape the bulk of this reallocation.

Production Networks and R&D Allocation

with Koki Okumura · PDF ·

Abstract

This paper studies how production networks shape innovation and entry incentives. We develop a dynamic model in which new products inherit the supplier and buyer relationships accumulated by their firms. Innovating firms capture only part of the surplus their innovations generate for trading partners and do not internalize how innovation changes other firms’ opportunities to form trading relationships. We show that reallocating R&D from entry toward incumbent expansion, and from younger toward older incumbents with more extensive trading relationships, raises welfare. We discipline the model using matched Japanese firm-to-firm transaction and patent data. In the estimated economy, the socially optimal allocation reduces long-run entry by 54%, and the transition to this allocation raises consumption-equivalent welfare by 2.8%.

Inventor Mobility, Knowledge Diffusion, and Growth

with Toshitaka Maruyama and Koki Okumura · PDF ·

Abstract

We study how inventor mobility shapes knowledge diffusion, economic growth, and welfare. Using German patent data linked to employer-employee records, we show that inventor mobility is associated with knowledge diffusion. Motivated by this evidence, we develop and calibrate an endogenous-growth model in which inventors contribute through both internal R&D and mobility across firms. We use the model to evaluate restrictions on non-compete clauses and the macroeconomic consequences of declining inventor mobility. Banning non-compete clauses raises annual growth by 0.036 percentage points, but it also increases vacancy posting and lowers welfare by 0.38%. We also find that the observed decline in inventor mobility reduces growth by 0.25 percentage points, with 0.05 points coming from weaker internal R&D and 0.19 points from weaker knowledge diffusion. The mobility decline also lowers consumption-equivalent welfare by 3.49%.

Productivity and Misallocation Dynamics under Dominant Currency Paradigm

PDF ·

Abstract

US monetary policy has a significant impact on the global economy, with recent literature emphasizing the dollar’s role as the dominant currency. This paper examines how US monetary policy affects productivity in non-US economies through allocative efficiency. We develop a two-country model featuring dollar dominance in trade and misallocations from markup heterogeneity. When US monetary policy tightens, dollar appreciation affects non-US economies through two channels. First, it lowers the marginal costs in dollars of non-US exporters, causing large export firms with high markups that underproduce relative to the efficient allocation to incompletely pass through these changes, thereby increasing their markups further. Second, in domestic markets, dollar appreciation raises import prices, easing competitive pressures for local producers. Both effects reallocate resources from large, high-markup firms to small, low-markup firms, worsening allocative efficiency. Using plant-level data from Chile and Colombia, where trade is predominantly invoiced in dollars, we provide evidence of factor reallocation from high-markup to low-markup firms following US monetary tightening.

Contact

• Email: yasu@unc.edu
• Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill