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.
Publications
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
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.
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.
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.
Abstract
This paper investigates how production networks shape firms’ R&D decisions and the resulting aggregate inefficiencies. We develop a dynamic model in which firms form supplier relationships through an exogenous yet persistent matching process and rely on those links to introduce new products. The model features two sources of misallocation. Market-power distortions and a network-formation externality whereby firms fail to internalize that their R&D makes them more attractive trading partners, improving match quality for all firms in the economy. We estimate the model using Japanese firm-to-firm transaction and patent data and show that the first-best allocation lies close to the decentralized outcome. Market-power corrections raise R&D incentives for older firms by relieving double marginalization along long supply chains. Internalizing the network-formation externality instead tilts R&D toward younger firms that expand their supplier base most rapidly. These opposing forces offset each other, leaving the planner’s allocation near the observed one.
Abstract
We analyze the impact of inventor mobility between firms on knowledge diffusion, economic growth, and welfare. Using German patent data matched with employer-employee data, we provide evidence showing that inventor mobility between firms is associated with knowledge diffusion. Motivated by this evidence, we develop an endogenous economic growth model in which inventors contribute to knowledge diffusion by moving between firms, in addition to engaging in internal R&D within firms. Using a model calibrated with German data, we first analyze the impact of non-compete clauses. We find that banning non-compete clauses reduces welfare by 0.38%. Furthermore, we show that optimal regulation of non-compete clauses leads to an allocation that closely approximates the social optimum. Finally, to analyze the impact of the decline in inventor mobility on economic growth over the past few decades, we calibrate the model to match the observed transition path of inventor mobility. Our results show that the decline in inventor mobility reduced growth from internal R&D by 0.04 pp and growth from knowledge diffusion by 0.20 pp, resulting in a total decrease in economic growth of 0.24 pp.
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