Pablo MILENI MUNARI will defend his thesis on Monday 29th June at 15:30 pm (Auditorium 5, bâtiment TSE and also by zoom)
Title: Essays in Macroeconomics
Supervisor: Professor Fabrice COLLARD
Memberships are:
- Fabrice COLLARD : Senior Researcher, CNRS-TSE R Supervisor
- Eugenia GONZALEZ-AGUADO : Assistant professor in Economics, TSE, Université Toulouse Capitole Examinatrice
- Alexander GUEMBEL : professor in Economics, TSE-TSM Université Toulouse Capitole Examinateur
- Charles BRENDON : Associate professor in Economics, Queen’s College, Cambridge Rapporteur
- Franck PORTIER : Professor in Economics, University College of London Rapporteur
Abstract :
In Chapter 1, I study how firm heterogeneity in automation adoption shapes wage inequality. I develop a static general equilibrium model with heterogeneous producers that endogenously choose their automation level in a task-based production technology and set wages in imperfectly competitive labor markets. The model provides an identification strategy that isolates the wage effects of automation from unobserved time-varying productivity shocks by exploiting joint movements in relative input prices and quantities. Using French manufacturing data linking firm-level investments in industrial robots to administrative employer--employee records, I find that white-collar workers at automating firms experience wage gains of 7% relative to their counterparts at non-automating firms, while blue-collar workers gain about 5% --- suggesting that firm-level automation also benefits replaceable workers. These estimates imply that, over the last two decades, automation has raised the variance of wages across skill groups by about 15%, and the variance among workers with the same skills employed at automating versus non-automating firms by a larger 20%. The firm-heterogeneity channel is therefore the largest source of automation-driven inequality in the decomposition, exceeding the classical skill-bias channel.
In Chapter 2, I propose a theory linking the production of information in stock markets to the macroeconomic propagation of aggregate shocks. Heterogeneous firms allocate inputs under imperfect information about the marginal revenue product of their inputs --- the firm's fundamental --- and learn about it from their stock price, set in a Kyle-style market in which a privately informed speculator endogenously chooses how much information to acquire at a convex cost. I show that the return to information acquisition rises both with the cross-sectional volatility of firm fundamentals (a standard result) and with their mean: as firms come to expect higher fundamentals, they grow larger, profits become more sensitive to the realisation of the fundamental, and the absolute mispricing widens. I call this the emph{firm-scale channel of mispricing}. In a dynamic general-equilibrium version of the model, both first- and second-moment aggregate shocks raise equilibrium information production, amplifying the peak macroeconomic response to productivity shocks by 7% and to uncertainty shocks by $56%$. The chapter therefore shows that firms' learning from financial markets can be a powerful endogenous amplifier of business-cycle dynamics, reshaping the misallocation of resources at the cross-section and so the aggregate efficiency of the economy.
In Chapter 3, coauthored with Wenxuan Xu and Andrei Zaloilo, we study how firms transmit productivity shocks to their workers through three margins: hourly wages, hours worked, and separation rates. Using French matched employer--employee data, we document that high-paying jobs adjust mainly through hourly wages --- at 2.6 times the semi-elasticity of low-paying ones --- while low-paying jobs adjust primarily through hours worked (at 40 times the semi-elasticity of high-paying jobs) and through separation rates (at 10 times). We then develop an equilibrium labor-market search model with dynamic contracts in which firms share risk with their workers across these three margins and in which employers differ in their cost of creating vacancies. Firms share risk through the margins that are least costly to them, given their heterogeneous hiring costs and the on-the-job mobility of their workers. The framework implies that policies that aim to reduce labor-income risk by targeting only one margin --- minimum wages, hours restrictions, firing-cost regulations --- can be ineffective when firms offload risk onto the other margins.
