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 Macro.
CV { pdf } // Email { pau.roldan@bde.es } // Profiles { Google Scholar | IDEAS | ORCID }
I obtained my PhD in Economics from New York University in 2018.
My interests are in Macroeconomics, specifically Economic Growth, Search & Matching and International Macro.
CV { pdf } // Email { pau.roldan@bde.es } // Profiles { Google Scholar | IDEAS | ORCID }
PUBLICATIONS
Markups and Cost Structure: Small Spanish Firms during the Great Recession
with Pilar Garcia-Perea and Aitor Lacuesta
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 192, pages 137-158, December 2021
{ published version | working paper }
Advertising, Innovation and Economic Growth
with Laurent Cavenaile
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Vol. 13, No. 3, pages 251-303, July 2021
{ published version | working paper }
Media coverage: LSE Business Review
Firm Dynamics and Pricing under Customer Capital Accumulation
with Sonia Gilbukh
Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 118, pages 99-119, March 2021
{ published version | working paper | online appendix }
Markups and Cost Structure: Small Spanish Firms during the Great Recession
with Pilar Garcia-Perea and Aitor Lacuesta
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 192, pages 137-158, December 2021
{ published version | working paper }
Advertising, Innovation and Economic Growth
with Laurent Cavenaile
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Vol. 13, No. 3, pages 251-303, July 2021
{ published version | working paper }
Media coverage: LSE Business Review
Firm Dynamics and Pricing under Customer Capital Accumulation
with Sonia Gilbukh
Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 118, pages 99-119, March 2021
{ published version | working paper | online appendix }
WORKING PAPERS
The Aggregate Effects of Acquisitions on Innovation and Economic Growth (November 2021)
with Christian Fons-Rosen and Tom Schmitz
{ working paper | SSRN version | slides }
Large incumbent firms routinely acquire startups. The effect of these acquisitions on innovation and productivity growth is a priori unclear. On the one hand, acquisitions provide an incentive for startup creation, and a way to transfer ideas to potentially more efficient users. On the other hand, incumbents might "kill" some ideas of their targets, and acquisitions may create a less competitive environment with lower incentives for innovation. Our paper quantitatively assesses the net effect of these forces. To do so, we build an endogenous growth model with heterogeneous firms and acquisitions. We discipline the model by matching evidence from a rich micro dataset on startup acquisitions and patenting. Our calibrated model implies that acquisitions do raise the startup rate, but lower incumbents’ own innovation as well as the percentage of implemented startup ideas. The negative forces are slightly stronger. Thus, a startup acquisition ban would increase growth by 0.03 percentage points per year.
International Trade and Innovation Dynamics with Endogenous Markups (September 2020)
with Laurent Cavenaile and Tom Schmitz
Economic Journal, Revise & Resubmit
{ working paper | online appendix | slides }
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 (March 2021)
with Laurent Cavenaile, Murat Alp Celik and Xu Tian
{ working paper | SSRN version | slides }
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.
