I am a researcher and economist at the International Monetary Fund specializing in economic growth, innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology adoption. My research combines quantitative economic modeling with rigorous empirical methods to illuminate the mechanisms driving innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology choices on a macro scale.

When I am not solving models or analyzing data, I enjoy playing basketball, reading books, and listening to tech and policy podcasts.

On this page you can find my research, an overview of my policy work, and my latest CV. Please do not hesitate to reach out!

[CV, LinkedIn, Email]

Publications

Nonprofits in Good Times and Bad Times (with Christine L. Exley and Stephen J. Terry) — 2023
Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, Vol 1. No. 1.
[Publication, Working Paper]

Need fluctuates over the business cycle. We conduct a survey revealing a desire for nonprofit activities to countercyclically expand during downturns. We then demonstrate, using comprehensive US nonprofit data drawn from millions of tax returns, that the public’s hopes are disappointed. Nonprofit expenditure, revenue, and balance sheets fluctuate procyclically: contracting during national and local downturns. This finding is evident even for a narrow group of nonprofits the public most wishes would expand during downturns, e.g., those providing critical needs like food or housing. Our new facts contribute to the charitable giving, nonprofit, and business cycle literatures.

Working Papers

Does Monopsony Matter for Innovation? — 2025
Revise & Resubmit, Econometrica
[Paper, IMF WP]

This paper examines how firms’ monopsony power—their ability to depress wages by restricting employment—in the market for inventors aﬀects U.S. innovation and economic growth. Using an instrumental variable strategy, I estimate firm-level inventor labor supply elasticities and find that firms face less than perfectly elastic supply, with larger employers wielding greater monopsony power. I develop and quantify a heterogeneous firms growth model with size-dependent monopsony power that matches this evidence. The model suggests that monopsony power reduces annual U.S. economic growth by 0.20 percentage points and welfare by 11% through depressed R&D employment and misallocation.

Did R&D Misallocation Contribute to Slower Growth? — 2025
Reject & Resubmit, Review of Economics Studies
[Paper, IMF WP]

This paper provides evidence that rising misallocation in the R&D sector contributed to the recent slowdown in U.S. productivity growth. I develop a growth accounting framework allowing for misallocation of R&D resources across firms captured by wedges between their marginal cost and benefits of R&D. I show that R&D wedges can be measured from R&D returns and document large and persistent differences in R&D returns across US-listed firms. Combining data and model, I estimate that frictions reduced productivity growth by 18% over 1975–2014 and that rising misallocation in the R&D sector accounts for 25% of the growth slowdown.

The Price of Intelligence: How Should Socially-minded Firms Price and Deploy AI? (with Pascual Restrepo) — 2025
Conditionally Accepted, Journal of Monetary Economics
[Paper]

Leading AI firms claim to prioritize social welfare. How should firms with a social mandate price and deploy AI? We derive pricing formulas that depart from profit maximization by incorporating incentives to enhance welfare and reduce labor disruptions. Using US data, we evaluate several scenarios. A welfarist firm that values both profit and welfare should price closer to marginal cost, as efficiency gains outweigh distributional concerns. A conservative firm focused on labor-market stability should price above the profit-maximizing level in the short run, especially when its AI may displace low-income workers. Overall, socially minded firms face a trade-off between expanding access to AI and the resulting loss in profits and labor market risks.

Optimal Gradualism (with Pascual Restrepo) — 2024
Under revision.
[Paper]

This paper studies how gradualism affects the welfare gains from trade, technology, and reforms.When workers face adjustment frictions, gradual shocks create less adverse distributional effects in the short run. We show that there are welfare gains from inducing a more gradual transition via temporary taxes on trade and technology and provide formulas for the optimal path for taxes. Our formulas account for the possibility that reallocation effort responds to policy and for the existence of income taxes and assistance programs. Using these formulas, we compute the optimal temporary taxes needed to mitigate the distributional consequences of rising import competition from China and the deployment of automation technologies substituting for routine jobs. Our formulas can also be used to compute the optimal timing of economic reforms or trade liberalizations. We study Colombia's trade liberalization in 1990 and conclude that optimal policy called for a more gradual reform.

Innovation in an Aging Economy — 2023
Under revision.
[Paper]

This paper provides evidence that rapid workforce aging has contributed to slow productivity growth in the US over the last two decades, through its impact on innovation. I document that workforce aging in local labor markets leads to a reduction in R&D employment and fewer inventions using an instrumental variable strategy. Reductions in R&D employment are driven by within-age group changes, rather than a composition eﬀect driven by age-specific R&D employment rates. This finding suggests that workforce aging impacts innovation through a demand channel, i.e., younger workers have a higher demand for inventions, rather than a supply channel operating, e.g., through the comparative advantage of young workers in innovation. Corroborating a strong demand channel of demographics, I also find that the workforce aging of international trading partners leads to a reduction in local innovation.

OnGoing Projects

The Impact of Rising Minimum Wages in Mexico (with Johanna Schauer and Hugo Tuesta) — 2025
Draft coming soon.

Since 2016, Mexico has implemented sharp increases in its minimum wage, raising the minimum-to-median wage ratio to historically high levels. We document the impact of these changes using state-level variation in the minimum wage bite. Our estimates show that, despite large increases, employment and formalization rates remained broadly stable, while wage gains at the bottom of the distribution were modest. To evaluate the consequences of continuing these policies, we employ a quantitative general equilibrium model with monopsony and informality. The model matches the muted empirical effects observed up to 2024 but indicates that further hikes will reduce welfare by pushing workers into the less productive informal sector. These results suggest that minimum wage policy in emerging markets with large informal sectors may display limited short-term costs but important longer-run trade-offs.

The Not so Simple Economics of Simplified Tax Regimes — 2025
Ongoing.

Simplified tax regimes are ubiquitous across developing and developed economies. In the developing market context, they are often intended to curb informality by lowering the entry costs into the formal sector. At the last time, these regimes discourage firm growth around the graduation threshold and instead incentivize firms to remain artificially small. In this project, we investigate under what conditions such simplified tax regimes can be beneficial and provide conditions under which they raise aggregate output and employment in partial equilibrium of a stylized model. We then build a quantitative extension to analyze the quantitative implications of selected example economies. Our results suggests that simplified regimes can be beneficial, however, only when being sufficiently unattractive for productive firms that would choose formality in absence of the simplified regime.

Misallocation and Automation in Developing Economies — 2025
Ongoing.

Automation technologies allow for the substitution of capital for labor inputs. In environments with frictions, these choices reflect not only marginal cost differences, but also any differential constraints due to frictions. In this project, we document that average factor product dispersion for capital is an order of magnitude higher than for variable costs. Furthermore, the two factor products are uncorrelated across firms for a large set of countries. These findings cast doubt on common shifters as primary source of factor product dispersion and suggest that rising capital intensity, as observed in many developing countries, may lead to economies with larger degrees of factor misallocation. Combining the frameworks of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) and Acemoglu and Restrepo (2018), we find that factor product dispersion is less costly in economies with automation choices. Furthermore, we find that rising automation itself does not necessarily lead to rising misallocation, however, it can lead to significant mismeasurement of TFP. Applying our model to the case of Mexico, we find that the rise in automation implied by declining labor shares did not lead to rising misallocation nor to declining TFP when appropriately measured.

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