Gabriel Züllig forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling

Gabriel Züllig forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling :"Empirical Essays in Macroeconomics: Heterogeneous Firms, Workers, and Industries"

Kandidat

Gabriel Züllig

Tid og sted

18. september 2020 kl. 15:00. Link til at logge på overværelse af forsvaret følger her:https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/j/69539178465

Bedømmelsesudvalg

• Lektor Niels Johannesen, Økonomisk Institut, Københavns Universitet, Danmark (formand)
• Lektor Ivan Petrella, Warwick Business School, UK
• Prof. Mikael Carlsson, Uppsala Universitet, Sverige

Abstract:
 
This thesis consists of three self-contained chapters in the field of macroeconomics.
 
The first chapter studies the labor market adjustments to a large reduction in credit supply to firms. I use Danish bank-borrower data and exploit the fact that banks had different exposures to the money-market freeze during the global financial crisis, translating to different levels of credit supply to firms. Businesses without access to internal or external liquidity reduced employment but did not cut their employees’ wages. Instead, they change the composition of their labor force to less expensive workers. Workers with previously high wages take substantial wage cuts in their new job. My findings are consistent with large employment effects of financial shocks and low wage growth well into the recovery.
 
Chapter two, co-authored with Luca Dedola and Mark Strøm Kristoffersen, uses a novel methodology to estimate the structural pass-through of cost shocks to firms’ prices in the Danish PPI. In doing so, our approach accounts and tests for many features present in structural macroeconomic models such as nominal rigidities. We show that the selection bias that a commonly used menu cost model introduces in the estimation is statistically significant, but not economically meaningful. The pass-through of firm-level cost shocks such as to the price of imports is well below one, indicating that firms let mark-ups absorb cost increases in order to preserve market share. We also provide evidence of strategic complementarities between firms.
 
If firms of different sectors are interlinked, shocks to a particular sector will transmit along supply chains to other sectors over time. The third chapter takes this idea to a forecasting exercise. Proposing time series models that incorporate both heterogeneous sectors and their interactions, we let those models compete in a horse race to determine the best forecasts of output. We show that the most accurate model is the one that is best able to understand the degree of sectoral comovement, i.e. to distinguish between sectoral and common shocks. This chapter is co-authored with Gregor Bäurle and Elizabeth Steiner.