Sargent Reading Group Notes

This paper studies the hypothesis that the use of big data sets and technologies by financial firms has lowered the cost of capital for large firms, relative to small ones, allowing large firms to grow larger. The authors motivate the study of the growth rate of small and large firms by noting that in terms of employment and revenue share, the firms in the top 5% have grown more and faster relative to small firms.

The goal of this paper is to understand what impacts a redistribution from rich to poor has on short run output. The authors want to understand the mechanisms or model assumptions that lead to quantitatively significant effects. The standard thinking is that a transfer from rich to poor will stimulate the economy, because in general the poor have a higher marginal propensity to consume out of wealth. The main finding of this paper is that this line of thinking is only correct and significant

This paper studies how the growth of the railroad infrastructure in the US between 1870 and 1890 changed the “market access” each county had to all other US counties and the implications for this change in market access on the value of agricultural land. Data In this time period, there were three primary modes of transportation (for moving freight): Roads travelled via wagon Canals travelled via barge Railroads The dataset used in this paper has three main components:

This paper uses a randomized empirical experiment to address how much exporting impacts firm performance. Tens of billions of dollars are spent each year by organizations like the world trade organization in an effort to help developing countries participate in global export markets. One justification for this spending is that people believe that exporting improves firm productivity through learning-by-exporting. When learning-by-exporting happens, trade generates efficiency gains that narrow the productivity gap and further magnify gains from trade.

This is what I’ll call an editorial paper where someone in economics that uses many tools and ideas from machine learning surveys the current usages of ML in econ and muses about the possible future interactions between the two fields. There isn’t a whole lot of meat here in terms of model or data, but there are interesting concepts that I think will be applicable to empirical economists in the future.

This paper analyzes a theoretical framework for thinking about how information can be productized and priced. Model This is a static, one-shot model. There are two agents: a decision maker or data buyer, and a data seller. There a finite number of states and a finite number of actions available to the decision maker. The true state is hidden to the data buyer. The data buyer receives utility based on the realized state and action she chooses.

This author uses data from just before and after the trans Atlantic telegraph was completed to study how information frictions distorted international trade in cotton between the US and the United Kingdom. Data This paper uses from July 29, 1865 through July 27, 1867. The telegraph was completed in July 28, 1866 – 1/2 of the sample is before the telegraph and 1/2 is after. At the time, the primary route for cotton trade was between New York City and Liverpool England.

This paper uses legal reform in the energy industry in the UK as a natural experiment to study how firms learn to compete and optimally set prices while converging to behavior that looks like competitive Nash equilibrium. TODO: revise the last few words. Nash what exactly? Electricity in the UK The paper goes into very interesting detail about how the electricity collection and delivery happens in the UK. I’ll do my best to cover the essential parts here.

The contribution of this paper is a model of how growth and wage inequality can be co-determined in equilibrium. The model is studied in both closed economy and international trade settings. We will focus on the closed economy description of the model and briefly mention the implications of having two copies of this economy interact in labor and product markets. Model Environment Infinite horizon, discrete time. One country that operates two sectors: research (idea creation) and production (idea using).

CLOSED: [2017-11-13 Mon 09:37] Data The goal of this paper is to use firm-level data to determine the determinants of productivity and output growth. To do this, the authors use a nearly-balanced panel from 1987-1994 on 527 of the fortune 1000 firms to attempt to estimate the impact on investment in computers on output and productivity growth. This panel is a merging of compustat data with data from the Computer Intelligence InfoCorp, or CII.