Postdoctoral Publications

2021
Jäggi, A., Schetter, U. & Schneider, M.T., 2021. Inequality, Openness, and Growth through Creative Destruction.Abstract
We examine how inequality and openness interact in shaping the long-run growth prospects of developing countries. To this end, we develop a Schumpeterian growth model with heterogeneous households and non-homothetic preferences for quality. We show that inequality affects growth very differently in an open economy as opposed to a closed economy: If the economy is close to the technological frontier, the positive demand effect of inequality on growth found in closed-economy models may be amplified by international competition. In countries with a larger distance to the technology frontier, however, rich households satisfy their demand for high quality via importing, and the effect of inequality on growth is smaller than in a closed economy and may even be negative. We show that this theoretical prediction holds up in the data, both when considering growth in export quality at the industry level and when considering growth in GDP per capita.
2021-02-cid-fellows-wp-130-inequality-growth.pdf
Cakmakli, C., et al., 2021. The Economic Case for Global Vaccinations: An Epidemiological Model with International Production Networks.Abstract
COVID-19 pandemic had a devastating effect on both lives and livelihoods in 2020. The arrival of effective vaccines can be a major game changer. However, vaccines are in short supply as of early 2021 and most of them are reserved for the advanced economies. We show that the global GDP loss of not inoculating all the countries, relative to a counterfactual of global vaccinations, is higher than the cost of manufacturing and distributing vaccines globally. We use an economic-epidemiological framework that combines a SIR model with international production and trade networks. Based on this framework, we estimate the costs for 65 countries and 35 sectors. Our estimates suggest that up to 49 percent of the global economic costs of the pandemic in 2021 are borne by the advanced economies even if they achieve universal vaccination in their own countries.
2021-01-cid-faculty-wp-390-global_vaccinations.pdf
2020
Production Ability and Economic Growth
Bustos, S. & Yildirim, M., 2020. Production Ability and Economic Growth. Research Policy . Publisher's VersionAbstract
Cities and countries undergo constant structural transformation. Industries need many inputs, such as regulations, infrastructure or productive knowledge, which we call capabilities. And locations are successful in hosting industries insofar as the capabilities that they can provide. We propose a capabilities-based production model and an empirical strategy to measure the Sophistication of a product and the Production Ability of a location. We apply our framework to international trade data and employment data in the United States, recovering measures of Production Ability for countries and cities, and the Sophistication of products and industries. We show that both country- and city-level measures have a strong correlation with income and economic growth at different time horizons. Product Sophistication is positively correlated with indicators of human capital and wages. Our model-based estimations predict product appearances and disappearances through the extensive margin.
Macroeconomic Rationales for Public Investments in Science
Gersbach, H., Schetter, U. & Schneider, M.T., 2020. Macroeconomic Rationales for Public Investments in Science. Economic Inquiry , 59. Publisher's VersionAbstract
What is the economic rationale for investing in science? Based on an open economy model of creative destruction, we characterize four key factors of optimal investment in basic research: the stage of economic development, the strength of the manufacturing base, the degree of openness, and the share of foreign‐owned firms. For each of these factors, we analyze its bearings on optimal basic research investment. We then show that the predicted effects are consistent with patterns observed in the data and discuss how the factor‐based approach might inform basic research policies.
Shen, J.H., 2020. Supply-Side Structural Reform and Dynamic Capital Structure Adjustment: Evidence from Chinese-Listed Firms. Pacific-Basin Finance Journal , 65. Publisher's VersionAbstract

The literature extensively discusses the increasing commitment toward comprehensive structural reform of China’s economy as it targets to achieve high quality and sustainable economic growth. This research investigates the inherent relationship between supply-side structural reform (SSSR) and dynamic capital structure adjustment in Chinese-listed firms. Our results show that SSSR’s introduction has significantly improved the adjustment speed toward the optimal debt ratio, especially for firms with high indebtedness and low investment performance. Importantly, China’s bond market plays a crucial role through SSSR for firms’ debt ratio to adjust toward their optimal level. However, there is no such evidence among state-owned enterprises (SOEs), suggesting that the structural reform concerning corporate capital structure for SOEs is more challenging and longstanding when compared with non-SOEs.

Shen, J.H., 2020. Towards a Dynamic Model of the Industrial Upgrading with Global Value Chains. The World Economy. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This research constructs a simple dynamic model to illustrate the micro‐mechanism of industrial upgrading along the global value chains. Our model predicts that as firms move up from downstream to upstream stages, (a) there is higher profitability if and only if the following three conditions are satisfied. First, the increasing rate of sunk cost (including R&D expenditure) over sequential stages of production cannot be sufficiently large (endogenous sunk cost effect). Second, the decreasing rate of change of intermediate input demand with respect to the price set by firms at a production stage cannot be sufficiently high (intermediate input price effect). Third, the decreasing rate of change of intermediate input demand with respect to the pricing dynamics over the sequential stages of production cannot be sufficiently large (sequential pricing uncertainty effect); (b) total cost is lower if and only if the decreasing rate of change of input demand with respect to the price is sufficiently large; (c) output is higher if and only if and the decreasing rate of change of input demand with respect to the price is not sufficiently large; and (d) the price decreases. We show that the empirical patterns revealed in China are consistent with our model's predictions.

Coscia, M., et al., 2020. The Node Vector Distance Problem in Complex Networks. ACM Computing Surveys , 53 (6). Publisher's VersionAbstract

We describe a problem in complex networks we call the Node Vector Distance (NVD) problem, and we survey algorithms currently able to address it. Complex networks are a useful tool to map a non-trivial set of relationships among connected entities, or nodes. An agent—e.g., a disease—can occupy multiple nodes at the same time and can spread through the edges. The node vector distance problem is to estimate the distance traveled by the agent between two moments in time. This is closely related to the Optimal Transportation Problem (OTP), which has received attention in fields such as computer vision. OTP solutions can be used to solve the node vector distance problem, but they are not the only valid approaches. Here, we examine four classes of solutions, showing their differences and similarities both on synthetic networks and real world network data. The NVD problem has a much wider applicability than computer vision, being related to problems in economics, epidemiology, viral marketing, and sociology, to cite a few. We show how solutions to the NVD problem have a wide range of applications, and we provide a roadmap to general and computationally tractable solutions. We have implemented all methods presented in this article in a publicly available open source library, which can be used for result replication.

Hartog, M., Lopez-Cordova, J.E. & Neffke, F., 2020. Assessing Ukraine's Role in European Value Chains: A Gravity Equation-cum-Economic Complexity Analysis Approach.Abstract
We analyze Ukraine's opportunities to participate in European value chains, using traditional gravity models, combined with tools from Economic Complexity Analysis to study international trade (exports) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). This toolbox is shown to be predictive of the growth and entry of new exports to the EU's Single Market, as well as foreign direct investments from the Single Market in Ukraine. We find that Ukraine has suffered from a decline of trade with Russia, which has led not only to a quantitative but also a qualitative deterioration in Ukrainian exports. Connecting to western European value chains is in principle possible, with several opportunities in the automotive, information technology and other sectors. However, such a shift may lead to a spatial restructuring of the Ukrainian economy and a mismatch between the geographical supply of and demand for labor.
2020-10-cid-fellows-wp-129-ukraine-role.pdf
Schetter, U. & Tejada, O., 2020. On Globalization and the Concentration of Talent: A General Result on Superstar Effects and Matching.Abstract
We analyze how globalization affects the allocation of talent across competing teams in large matching markets. Focusing on amplified superstar effects, we show that a convex transformation of payoffs promotes positive assortative matching. This result holds under minimal assumptions on how skills translate into competition outcomes and how competition outcomes translate into payoffs. Our analysis covers many interesting special cases, including simple extensions of Rosen (1981) and Melitz (2003) with competing teams. It also provides new insights on the distributional consequences of globalization, and on the role of technological change, urban agglomeration, and taxation for the composition of teams.
2019-12-cid-fellows-wp-121-global-concentration-talent-revised-oct-2020.pdf
revised October 2020
Zhao, D., Chen, Y. & Shen, J.H., 2020. Mortgage Payments and Household Consumption in Urban China. Economic Modelling , 93 , pp. 100-111. Publisher's VersionAbstract

By exploiting variation both in mortgage payoffs and mortgage interest rate resets, we find that a decline in mortgage payments induces a significant increase in nondurable goods spending, even when households have substantial amounts of liquidity. Following mortgage payoff, households increase consumption expenditures by 61% of the original payment. In comparison, households increase consumption by only 36% in response to a transitory payment adjustment induced by interest rate changes. Households with a higher payment-to-income ratio have a significantly lower marginal propensity to consume (MPC). These results have practical implications for policy markers seeking to design consumption boosting policies and are important for understanding how changes in monetary policy may affect consumer spending patterns.

Knowledge Diffusion in the Network of International Business Travel
Coscia, M., Neffke, F. & Hausmann, R., 2020. Knowledge Diffusion in the Network of International Business Travel. Nature Human Behaviour , 4 (10). Publisher's VersionAbstract

We use aggregated and anonymized information based on international expenditures through corporate payment cards to map the network of global business travel. We combine this network with information on the industrial composition and export baskets of national economies. The business travel network helps to predict which economic activities will grow in a country, which new activities will develop and which old activities will be abandoned. In statistical terms, business travel has the most substantial impact among a range of bilateral relationships between countries, such as trade, foreign direct investments and migration. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this impact is causal: business travel from countries specializing in a specific industry causes growth in that economic activity in the destination country. Our interpretation of this is that business travel helps to diffuse knowledge, and we use our estimates to assess which countries contribute or benefit the most from the diffusion of knowledge through global business travel.

Additional content:

Hausmann, R. & Schetter, U., 2020. Horrible Trade-offs in a Pandemic: Lockdowns, Transfers, Fiscal Space, and Compliance.Abstract

In this paper, we develop a heterogeneous agent general equilibrium framework to analyze optimal joint policies of a lockdown and transfer payments in times of a pandemic. In our model, the effectiveness of a lockdown in mitigating the pandemic depends on endogenous compliance. A more stringent lockdown deepens the recession which implies that poorer parts of society find it harder to subsist. This reduces their compliance with the lockdown, and may cause deprivation of the very poor, giving rise to an excruciating trade-off between saving lives from the pandemic and from deprivation. Lump-sum transfers help mitigate this trade-off. We identify and discuss key trade-offs involved and provide comparative statics for optimal policy. We show that, ceteris paribus, the optimal lockdown is stricter for more severe pandemics and in richer countries. We then consider a government borrowing constraint and show that limited fiscal space lowers the optimal lockdown and welfare, and increases the aggregate death burden during the pandemic. We finally discuss distributional consequences and the political economy of fighting a pandemic.

Additional readings:

2020-06-cid-wp-382-pandemic-trade-offs.pdf
Schetter, U., 2020. Quality Differentiation, Comparative Advantage, and International Specialization Across Products.Abstract

We introduce quality differentiation into a Ricardian model of international trade. We show that (1) quality differentiation allows industrialized countries to be active across the full board of products, complex and simple ones, while developing countries systematically specialize in simple products, in line with novel stylized facts. (2) Quality differentiation may thus help to explain why richer countries tend to be more diversified and why, increasingly over time, rich and poor countries tend to export the same products. (3) Quality differentiation implies that the gains from inter-product trade mostly accrue to developing countries. (4) Guided by our theory, we use a censored regression model to estimate the link between a country’s GDP per capita and its export quality. We find a much stronger relationship than when using OLS, in line with our theory.

2020-04-cid-fellows-wp-126-quality-differentiation.pdf
Shen, J.H., et al., 2020. Profit Sharing, Industrial Upgrading, and Global Supply Chains: Theory and Evidence.Abstract

This paper constructed a simple model to illustrate the global supply chain profit sharing and industrial upgrading mechanism, from which it was found that the average profitability distribution in the different supply chain stages was determined by two main factors: (1) the average product of the labor in the firms at each production stage; and (2) the ratio of the output elasticity of capital to the output elasticity of labor in each stage. This paper also proposed a new industrial upgrading mechanism, the ‘inter-supply chain upgrading’, for supply chain firms. Rises in production complexity and increased factor intensity in each production stage were found to be the two essential conditions for the inter-supply chain upgrading. The empirical study results were found to be broadly consistent with the proposed theories.

2020-02-cid-fellows-wp-123-global-supply-chain-revised-may.pdf
Revised May 2020.
Machine-learned patterns suggest that diversification drives economic development
Gomez, A., et al., 2020. Machine-learned patterns suggest that diversification drives economic development. Journal of the Royal Society Interface , 17 (162). Publisher's VersionAbstract
We combine a sequence of machine-learning techniques, together called Principal Smooth-Dynamics Analysis (PriSDA), to identify patterns in the dynamics of complex systems. Here, we deploy this method on the task of automating the development of new theory of economic growth. Traditionally, economic growth is modelled with a few aggregate quantities derived from simplified theoretical models. PriSDA, by contrast, identifies important quantities. Applied to 55 years of data on countries’ exports, PriSDA finds that what most distinguishes countries’ export baskets is their diversity, with extra weight assigned to more sophisticated products. The weights are consistent with previous measures of product complexity. The second dimension of variation is proficiency in machinery relative to agriculture. PriSDA then infers the dynamics of these two quantities and of per capita income. The inferred model predicts that diversification drives growth in income, that diversified middle-income countries will grow the fastest, and that countries will converge onto intermediate levels of income and specialization. PriSDA is generalizable and may illuminate dynamics of elusive quantities such as diversity and complexity in other natural and social systems.
2019
The Value of Complementary Coworkers
Neffke, F., 2019. The Value of Complementary Coworkers. Science Advances , 5 (12). Publisher's VersionAbstract

As individuals specialize in specific knowledge areas, a society’s know-how becomes distributed across different workers. To use this distributed know-how, workers must be coordinated into teams that, collectively, can cover a wide range of expertise. This paper studies the interdependencies among co-workers that result from this process in a population-wide dataset covering educational specializations of millions of workers and their co-workers in Sweden over a 10-year period. The analysis shows that the value of what a person knows depends on whom that person works with. Whereas having co-workers with qualifications similar to one’s own is costly, having co-workers with complementary qualifications is beneficial. This co-worker complementarity increases over a worker’s career and offers a unifying framework to explain seemingly disparate observations, answering questions such as “Why do returns to education differ so widely?” “Why do workers earn higher wages in large establishments?” “Why are wages so high in large cities?”

Additional resources: WebsitePodcast | Video | Media Release

Nedelkoska, L. & Neffke, F., 2019. Skill Mismatch and Skill Transferability: Review of Concepts and Measurements. Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography , 19 (21). Publisher's VersionAbstract
The notion of skills plays an increasingly important role in a variety of research fields. Since the foundational work on human capital theory, economists have approached skills through the lens of education, training and work experience, whereas early work in evolutionary economics and management stressed the analogy between skills of individuals and the organizational routines of firms. We survey how the concept of skills has evolved into notions such as skills mismatch, skill transferability and skill distance or skill relatedness in labor economics, management, and evolutionary approaches to economics and economic geography. We find that these disciplines converged in embracing increasingly sophisticated approaches to measuring skills. Economists have expanded their approach from quantifying skills in terms of years of education to measuring them more directly, using skill tests, self-reported skills and job tasks, or skills and job tasks reported by occupational experts. Others have turned to administrative and other large-scale data sets to infer skill similarities and complementarities from the careers of sometimes millions of workers. Finally, a growing literature on team human capital and skill complementarities has started thinking of skills as features of collectives, instead of only of individuals. At the same time, scholars in corporate strategy have studied the micro-determinants of team formation. Combined, the developments in both strands of research may pave the way to an understanding of how individual-level skills connect to firm-level routines.
Schetter, U., Gersbach, H. & Schneider, M.T., 2019. Taxation, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. The Economic Journal , 129 (620) , pp. 1731-1781. Publisher's VersionAbstract
We explore optimal and politically feasible growth policies consisting of basic research investments and taxation. We show that the impact of basic research on the general economy rationalises a taxation pecking order with high labour taxes and low profit taxes. This scheme induces a significant proportion of agents to become entrepreneurs, thereby rationalising substantial investments in basic research fostering their innovation prospects. These entrepreneurial economies, however, may make a majority of workers worse off, giving rise to a conflict between efficiency and equality. We discuss ways of mitigating this conflict, and thus strengthening political support for growth policies.
Schetter, U., 2019. A Structural Ranking of Economic Complexity.Abstract
We propose a structural alternative to the Economic Complexity Index (ECI, Hidalgo and Hausmann 2009; Hausmann et al. 2011) that ranks countries by their complexity. This ranking is tied to comparative advantages. Hence, it reveals information different from GDP per capita on the deep underlying economic capabilities of countries. Our analysis proceeds in three main steps: (i) We first consider a simplified trade model that is centered on the assumption that countries’ global exports are log-supermodular (Costinot, 2009a), and show that a variant of the ECI correctly ranks countries (and products) by their complexity. This model provides a general theoretical framework for ranking nodes of a weighted (bipartite) graph according to some under- lying unobservable characteristic. (ii) We then embed a structure of log-supermodular productivities into a multi-product Eaton and Kortum (2002)-model, and show how our main insights from the simplified trade model apply to this richer set-up. (iii) We finally implement our structural ranking of economic complexity. The derived ranking is robust and remarkably similar to the one based on the original ECI.
2019-11-cid-fellows-wp-119-structural-rank-ec.pdf
2018
Popularity Spikes Hurt Future Chances For Viral Propagation of Protomemes
Coscia, M., 2018. Popularity Spikes Hurt Future Chances For Viral Propagation of Protomemes. Communications of the ACM , 61 (1) , pp. 70-77. Publisher's VersionAbstract
A meme is a concept introduced by Dawkins12 as an equivalent in cultural studies of a gene in biology. A meme is a cultural unit, perhaps a joke, musical tune, or behavior, that can replicate in people's minds, spreading from person to person. During the replication process, memes can mutate and compete with each other for attention, because people's consciousness has finite capacity. Meme viral spreading causes behavioral change, for the better, as when, say, the "ALS Bucket Challenge" meme caused a cascade of humanitarian donations,a and for the worse, as when researchers proved obesity7 and smoking8 are socially transmittable diseases. A better theory of meme spreading could help prevent an outbreak of bad behaviors and favor positive ones.

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