Nicolas Vincent

Individual Price Adjustment Along the Extensive Margin

Firms employ a rich variety of pricing strategies whose implications for aggregate price dynamics often diverge. This situation poses a challenge for macroeconomists interested in bridging micro and macro price stickiness. In responding to this challenge, we note that differences in macro price stickiness across pricing mechanisms can often be traced back to price changes that are either triggered or cancelled by shocks. We exploit observed micro price behavior to quantify the importance of this margin of adjustment for the response of inflation to shocks. Across a range of empirical exercises, we find strong evidence that changes in the timing of price adjustments contribute significantly to the flexibility of the aggregate price level.

Growing Productivity without Growing Wages: The Micro-Level Anatomy of the Aggregate Labor Share Decline

The aggregate labor share in U.S. manufacturing declined dramatically over the last three decades: Since the mid-1980’s, the compensation for labor declined from 67% to 47% of value added which is unseen in any other sector of the U.S. economy. The labor share of the typical U.S. manufacturing plants, in contrast, rose by over 5 percentage points. We reconcile these two facts by documenting (1) an important reallocation of production towards “hyper-productive plants” and (2) a downward adjustment of the labor share of those same plants over time. These two related forces account for almost all the change in the trend of aggregate labor share in the manufacturing sector, with only a small role for exit of high-labor-share plants. Relative to their peers, plants that account for the majority of production by the late 2000s arrive at a low labor share by gradually increasing value added by a factor of three while keeping employment and compensation unchanged.

Financial Frictions and Investment Dynamics in Multi-Plant Firms

Using confidential Census data on U.S. manufacturing plants, we document that most of the dispersion in investment rates across plants occurs within rms instead of across firms. Between- firm dispersion is almost acyclical, but within- rm dispersion is strongly procyclical. To investigate the role of rms in the allocation of capital in the economy, we build a multi-plant model of the firm with frictions at both levels of aggregation. We show that external nancing constraints at the level of the rm can have important implications for plant-level investment dynamics. Finally, we present empirical evidence supporting the predictions of the model.

Price Stickiness in Customer Markets with Reference Prices

Price rigidity is often modeled by assuming that firms face a fixed cost of price change. However, in surveys, firms report that the main reason they wish to keep prices stable is for fear of antagonizing customers. Moreover, marketing studies show that most consumers engage in very little product comparison on a typical shopping trip. In this paper, we explore the implications of these observations for price rigidity. In our model, comparing prices and characteristics of alternative brands is time-consuming. While some consumers behave as bargain hunters with zero opportunity cost form shopping, most are loyal to firms as long as posted prices are not raised. A price increase is interpreted as a signal that a better alternative may be available and triggers consumer search. Firms do not face menu costs and are free to change nominal prices, but understand that their pricing decisions will affect their customer base and hence future profits. We show that this micro-founded mechanism is akin to a nominal rigidity and naturally generates price stickiness. It is also compatible with the observation of frequent sales at the retail level and can rationalize the decreasing or flat hazard functions observed empirically.

Do Firms Mitigate or Magnify Capital Misallocation? Evidence from Plant-Level Data

Almost two thirds of the cross-plant dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital occurs across plants within the same firm rather than between firms. Even though firms allocate investment very differently across their plants, they do not equalize marginal revenue products across their plants. We reconcile these findings in a model of multi-plant firms, physical adjustment costs and credit constraints. Credit constrained multi-plant firms can utilize internal capital markets by concentrating internal funds on investment projects in only a few of their plants in a given period and rotating funds to another set of plants in the future. The resulting increase in within-firm dispersion of marginal revenue products of capital is hence not a symptom of misallocation within the firm, but rather actions taken by the firm to mitigate external credit constraints and adjustment costs of capital. Economies with multi-plant firms produce more aggregate output despite higher dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital compared to economies with single-plant firms. Because emerging economies are predominantly populated by single-plant firms, the gains from reducing their distortions to the level of developed are larger than previously thought.