This paper introduces an internal capital market into a two-factor model of multisegment firms that features managers’ empire building and informational frictions within the organization. The headquarters knows less about a segment’s true cost than its divisional managers, so managers can over-report their costs and receive more capital than optimal. Our novel theory, which enables us to endogenize the cost structure of multi-segment firms, shows that international trade imposes discipline on divisional managers and improves the capital allocation across divisions, thereby lowering the conglomerate discount. The theory can explain why exporters exhibit a lower conglomerate discount than non-exporters. We exploit the China shock as an exogenous change to competition to confirm the model’s predictions with data on US companies.

We describe a model of trade with skills-based product differentiation and non-proportional trade costs that predicts a positive correlation between firms' export intensity, the price of their exports and the wages they pay to their workers. In equilibrium, firms that employ workers with comparatively scarcer skills export a larger proportion of their output, pay higher wages and charge higher prices. In line with empirical evidence, the model predicts that trade liberalization can cause the distribution of earnings to become more polarized, with patterns that reflect the heterogeneous effects of trade liberalization on firms' export performance.

Fantastic beasts are magical creatures that cannot be seen unless one looks for them with the eye of the wizard, but that still play a significant role in the world. The fantastic beasts we hunt and find in the present paper are welfare changes induced by resource shocks that are invisible in quantitative trade models with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms if one relies on the pervasive assumption of demand exhibiting constant elasticity of substitution. We argue that, for fantastic beasts to materialize, markups have to vary across firms and firm heterogeneity has to vary across sectors. This is shown both theoretically and empirically exploiting a panel of 76 countries and 17 manufacturing industries for the period 1995-2020.

This paper develops a dynamic spatial equilibrium model of a multi-region multi-sector open economy where heterogeneous agents choose optimally their job, making forward-looking decisions under aggregate uncertainty. We propose a solution of the system of individual dynamic optimal-control problems under rational expectations as a Mean Field Game, in discrete time and state space, preserving the full non-linear structure of the problem. With a calibration for France, we demonstrate that households behave substantially differently between aggregate uncertainty and perfect foresight. Aggregate uncertainty alters the patterns of labor reallocation in transition as well as in the long run.

This paper develops a two-sector, two-factor trade model with labor market frictions in which workers search for a job also when they are employed. On the job search (OJS) is a key ingredient to explain the response to trade liberalization of sectoral employment, unemployment and wage inequality. OJS generates wage dispersion and it leads to a reallocation of workers from less productive firms that pay lower wages to more productive ones. Following a trade liberalization the traditional selection effects are more severe than without OJS and the tradable sector experiences a loss of employment, while the opposite is true for the non tradable sector. Starting from autarky, the opening to trade has a positive effect on employment but it increases wage inequality. For an already open economy, a further increase of trade openness can, however, lead to an increase of unemployment. The dynamics of labor market variables is obtained in closed form. The model predicts overshooting at the time of implementation of a trade liberalization, then the paths of adjustment follow a stable transitional dynamics.

This paper develops a simple framework to characterize the distribution of income and wealth in a real business cycle model. Agents are of two types depending on the human factor of production they own and they are located in separated markets, cities. In each city the two types of agent match to produce a composite factor, human service. We show that if the population is an exchangeable sequence of agents’ types generated according to a P`olya urn then (i) the share of agents’ type follows a Beta distribution and (ii) the functional form of the matching function belongs to the family of the constant elasticity of substitution, with agent shares that depend on the composition of the population. We nest this structure into a standard Bewley economy, in which the aggregate supply of human service is combined with physical capital to produce the homogeneous output. Given the results (i)-(ii) we perform the exact aggregation of income, consumption and asset holding across agents, leading to the solution of the real business cycle model with heterogeneous agents. Our framework predicts that the theoretical distributions of income and wealth are known real valued transformations of a Beta distribution. This result provides a simple way to characterize the equilibrium of macroeconomic models with heterogeneous agents.