Research

Working Papers

• Intermediates-specific Technological Progress, Structural Change, and Growth
  [Job Market Paper] [Working paper] [slides]
  • Abstract

    As economies develop, they increasingly rely on services intermediates in production. While recent research highlights the importance of these shifts for aggregate dynamics, the mechanisms underlying them remain understudied. This paper quantifies the role of biased, intermediates-specific technological change as a key mechanism behind the rise of services intermediates - and its implications for broader structural transformation and aggregate growth - using a two-sector model with intermediates-specific technological change and a full input-output structure. Calibrated with U.S. data, the model indicates that intermediates-specific technological change has been driving the majority of the rise in services intermediates in the services-producing sector, but not in the goods-producing sector. This heterogeneity accounts for both the stagnation of value-added productivity in services and several aggregate trends: almost half of the increase in the services' share of intermediates and employment, roughly one-fifth of the rise in final expenditure shares, and approximately a 25% reduction in aggregate real GDP growth relative to an unbiased counterfactual. These findings establish biased intermediates-specific technological change as a central driver of the evolving production structure, the aggregate productivity slowdown, and structural change
• Demographic Transition and Engel’s Law across the Development Spectrum
  [Status: Revise & Resubmit, Economica] [working paper] [slides]
  • Abstract

    Economic progress brings with it two key patterns. Firstly, we observe the progressive aging of the population. Secondly, as nations' economies grow, the portion of food in total aggregate expenditures tends to decrease. Using country and household-level expenditure data from 20 countries across the entire development spectrum, this work documents that, as the age of household members increases, the proportion of total household expenditures dedicated to food also increases. A large heterogeneity between rich and developing countries emerges when using household-level variables -- such as head's and average age -- as standard in existing literature. This gap disappears when considering the exact household composition. This finding suggests that -- at any development level -- the demographic transition leads to a higher overall food share of total expenditures, slowing down structural transformation out of food consumption. I test this hypothesis by constructing a quantitative model that accounts for household demographic composition and documents that the demographic transition is a sizable force that slows down structural transformation. Due to the observed co-movement of demographic transition, structural change, and income growth, not accounting for demography leads to an underestimation of the income effect in almost all countries in the sample.
  • Presented at: STEG workshop, EAYE Annual conference, RGS 18th Doctoral Conference
  • Awarded STEG Ph.D. Research Grant (£12,000)

Work in Progress

• Comparing Standard of Living: A Nonparametric Approach to the Cost-of-Living Index
  [Extended Abstract] [Draft available soon]
  • Abstract

    Measuring the material standard of living in a comparable way remains a central challenge in economics. It is well known that conventional price adjustments impose restrictive assumptions on preferences, ignoring changes over time, income, age, and other socio-demographic characteristics that shape them. This project develops a nonparametric algorithm to approximate the ideal Cost-of-Living Index, expressing compensated expenditure shares as functions of observed shares and (compensated) price elasticities, which are estimable from panel data. The method accommodates arbitrary non-homothetic and state-variable-driven preferences. Applying this approach to multi-country household data enables tracing the evolution of the standard of living across groups and over time.
• Reverse Structural Change (with Georg Duernecker)
  [status: preliminary analysis completed]