​I am a Research Economist at the DG Economics and Research of Banco de España. 
I obtained my PhD in Economics from New York University in 2018. 
My interests are in Macroeconomics, specifically Economic Growth, Search & Matching and International Trade.   

CV { pdf }  //  Email { pau.roldan@bde.es }  //  Profiles { Google Scholar | IDEAS | ORCID } 

PUBLICATIONS

Advertising, Innovation and Economic Growth  { published version | working paper }
with Laurent Cavenaile
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, forthcoming

Firm Dynamics and Pricing under Customer Capital Accumulation  { published version | working paper | online appendix }
with Sonia Gilbukh
Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 118, pages 99-119, March 2021​

​WORKING PAPERS

​International Trade and Innovation Dynamics with Endogenous Markups  { working paper | online appendix | slides }
with Laurent Cavenaile and Tom Schmitz (September 2020)
Economic Journal, Revise & Resubmit

Lower costs of international trade affect both firms’ innovation incentives and their market power. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous innovation and endogenous markups to study the interaction between these effects. Lower trade costs stimulate innovation by large firms that are technologically close to their rivals. However, as innovators increase their productivity advantage over others, they also increase their markups. Our calibrated model suggests that a fall in trade costs which increases the trade-to-GDP ratio of the US manufacturing sector from 12% (its level in the 1970s) to 24% (its current level) increases productivity growth by 0.12 percentage points and the aggregate markup by 1.70 percentage points. Without the feedback effect of innovation on the productivity distribution, markups would actually have fallen.


​​​Style Over Substance? Advertising, Innovation, and Endogenous Market Structure  { working paper | SSRN version }
with Laurent Cavenaile, Murat Alp Celik and Xu Tian (March 2021)

Firms use both innovation and advertising to increase their profits, markups, and market shares. While they serve the same purpose from the firms' perspective, their broader implications vary substantially. In this paper, we study the interaction between these two intangible inputs and analyze the implications for competition, industry dynamics, economic growth, and social welfare. To this end, we develop an oligopolistic general-equilibrium growth model with firm heterogeneity in which market structure is endogenous, and firms' production, innovation, and advertising decisions strategically interact. We estimate the model to fit the non-linear relationship between innovation, advertising, and competition observed in the data. We find that advertising has significant macroeconomic effects: it improves static allocative efficiency through reducing misallocation, but it also depresses economic growth through a substitution effect with R&D. On the net, advertising is found to be welfare-improving. It is responsible for one third of the observed average net markup, and a quarter of its dispersion. We next study the optimal linear taxation/subsidization of advertising. We find that the optimal tax is quite high, yet finite, which serves to simultaneously increase dynamic efficiency and raise revenue, while still maintaining most of the benefits of advertising in the form of reduced misallocation, without the excessive spending due to the advertising rat race.


​​The Aggregate Effects of Acquisitions on Innovation and Economic Growth  { working paper | SSRN version }
with Christian Fons-Rosen and Tom Schmitz (March 2021)

Large incumbent firms routinely acquire startups. This may stimulate aggregate growth, as acquisitions provide an incentive for startup creation and transfer ideas to more efficient users. However, large firms do not always implement the ideas of their acquisition targets. Moreover, acquisitions create a rigid economy without turnover, where incumbents have little incentives to innovate themselves. To assess the net effect of these forces, we build a new endogenous growth model with heterogeneous firms and acquisitions. We discipline the model by matching aggregate moments and evidence from a rich micro dataset on acquisitions and patenting. Preliminary findings indicate that aggregate growth has an inverted U-shape in the frequency of acquisitions.




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