Firms, Frictions and The Macroeconomy

Objective

A central question of economics is how scarce resources should be allocated among competing needs. Over the past two decades, economists and policy makers have come to increasingly appreciate the importance of market frictions – e.g., informational, or financial, - in hindering the efficiency of resource allocation. This in turn has led to an avalanche of carefully designed corrective policies: from those that address financial sector stability to those that aim to boost market competition. For example, the central bank interventions in secondary markets for asset-backed securities – markets plagued by information asymmetries during the great financial crisis of 2008-09, - proved crucial in limiting the damage to the global economy. The lessons learned were responsible for the swift monetary-financial and fiscal responses during the COVID-pandemic. However, an important dimension of the problem has been overlooked so far: what investments/technologies can and should firms themselves make/adopt to overcome the inefficiencies caused by market frictions? The goal of this proposal is to advance the state-of-the-art by addressing this question from multiple angles, using novel conceptual frameworks, firm-level data, and quantitative models. The proposal comprises two parts, each focusing on inefficiencies stemming from a specific friction. Part I centers on financial frictions, exploring how firms choose investment technologies, such as asset specificity, considering their impact on borrowing capacity and the efficiency of asset allocation. Part II delves into information frictions, investigating how firms choose information acquisition strategies, such as data investments, anticipating the impact of imperfect information on the efficiency of resource allocation.