Management know-how shapes the productivity of firms and can be reallocated across countries as managers acquire control of factors of production abroad. We construct a quantitative model to investigate the aggregate consequences of the international reallocation of management know-how. Using aggregate data, we infer the relative scarcity of this form of know-how in a sample of developing countries. We find that developing countries gain, on average, 12% in output and 5% in welfare (with wide variation across countries) when they eliminate policy barriers to foreign control of domestic factors of production.

Abstract The money metric utility function is an essential tool for calculating welfare-relevant growth and inflation. We show how to recover it from repeated cross-sectional data without making parametric assumptions about preferences. We do this by solving the following recursive problem. Given compensated demand, we construct money metric utility by integration. Given money metric utility, we construct compensated demand by matching households over time whose money metric utility value is the same. We illustrate our method using household consumption survey data from the United Kingdom from 1974 to 2017 and find that real consumption calculated using official aggregate inflation statistics overstates money metric utility in 1974 pounds for the poorest households by around 0.5% a year and understates it by around a third of a percentage point per year for the richest households. We extend our method to allow for missing or mismeasured prices, assuming preferences are separable between goods with well-measured prices and the rest. We discuss how our results change if the prices of some service sectors are mismeasured.

Abstract We study markup cyclicality in a granular macroeconomic model with oligopolistic competition. We first characterize how firm, sectoral, and aggregate markups comove with output at different levels of aggregation in response to firm-level shocks. We quantify the model’s ability to reproduce salient features of the cyclical properties of measured markups in French administrative firm-level data from the bottom (firm) level to the aggregate level. We document that (i) firm-level markups rise with market share and sector-level markups with concentration, (ii) the relationship between markups and sectoral output varies by firm size—negative for small firms but positive for large ones, (iii) sector-level markups move positively with sectoral output, and (iv) sectoral markups show no systematic relationship with aggregate output. Our model helps rationalize these seemingly conflicting patterns of markup cyclicality in the data.