Huiyu Li
Research Advisor
Macroeconomic Research
Growth, Productivity, Firm dynamics
CV (pdf, 121.21 kb)
Profiles: Personal website
Working Papers
The Impact of COVID on Productivity and Potential Output
2022-19 | with Fernald | September 2022
abstract (+)The U.S. economy came into the pandemic, and looks likely to leave it, on a slow-growth path. The near- term level of potential output has fallen because of shortfalls in labor that should reverse over time. Labor productivity, to a surprising degree, has followed an accelerated version of its Great Recession path with initially strong growth followed by weak growth. But, as of mid-2022, it appears that the overall level of labor and total factor productivity are only modestly affected. The sign of the effect depends on whether we use the strong income-side measures of pandemic output growth or the much weaker expenditure-side measures. There is considerable heterogeneity across industries. We can explain some but not all of the heterogeneity through industry differences in cyclical utilization and off-the-clock hours worked. After accounting for these factors, industries where it is easy to work from home have grown somewhat faster than they did pre-pandemic. In contrast, industries where it is hard to work from home have performed extremely poorly.
Entry Costs Rise with Growth
Stanford Manuscript | with Klenow | August 2022
abstract (+)Over time and across states in the U.S., both the number of firms and the number establishments are closely tied to overall employment. By comparison, the number of businesses is at best weakly related to overall output per worker. In many models of firm dynamics, trade, and growth with a free entry condition, these facts imply that the costs of creating a new firm or plant increase sharply with productivity growth. This increase in entry costs can stem from rising cost of labor used in entry combined with weak knowledge spillovers from prior entry. How entry costs vary with growth matters for welfare. For example, our findings suggest that productivity enhancing policies will not induce entry of firms or plants, thereby limiting the total impact on welfare.
The Asymptotic Distribution of Estimators with Overlapping Simulation Draws
Manuscript | with Armstrong, Gallant, and Hong | August 2015
abstract (+)We study the asymptotic distribution of simulation estimators, where the same set of draws are used for all observations under general conditions that do not require the function used in the simulation to be smooth. We consider two cases: estimators that solve a system of equations involving simulated moments and estimators that maximize a simulated likelihood. Many simulation estimators used in empirical work involve both overlapping simulation draws and non-differentiable moment functions. Developing sampling theorems under these two conditions provides an important complement to the existing results in the literature on the asymptotics of simulation estimators.
Published Articles (Refereed Journals and Volumes)
A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents
Forthcoming in Review of Economic Studies | with Aghion, Bergeaud, Boppart, and Klenow
abstract (+)Growth has fallen in the U.S. amid a rise in firm concentration. Market share has shifted to low labor share firms, while within-firm labor shares have actually risen. We propose a theory linking these trends in which the driving force is falling overhead costs of spanning multiple products or a rising efficiency advantage of large firms. In response, the most efficient firms (with higher markups) spread into new product lines, thereby increasing concentration and generating a temporary burst of growth. Eventually, due to greater competition from efficient firms, within-firm markups and incentives to innovate fall. Thus our simple model can generate qualitative patterns in line with the observed trends.
Productivity Slowdown: Reducing the Measure of Our Ignorance
Forthcoming in The Economics of Creative Destruction: New Research on Themes from Aghion and Howitt | with Boppart
Leverage and Productivity
Journal of Development Economics 154(102752), January 2022
abstract (+)This paper argues that earnings-based borrowing is important for understanding the extent to which financial frictions lower aggregate productivity (TFP). It builds a general equilibrium model of misallocation due to financial frictions wherein firms borrow by pledging assets and earnings. The model is disciplined to match evidence on aggregate leverage and on the firm-level relationship between leverage and the output-to-capital ratio. Conditional on aggregate leverage, the TFP loss from financial frictions shrinks with the pledgeability of earnings. Similarly, for a given difference in aggregate leverage between two countries, financial frictions may contribute significantly more to TFP differences when the poorer country has lower pledgeability of earnings.
BLP Estimation Using Laplace Transformation and Overlapping Simulation Draws
Journal of Econometrics 222(1), Part A, May 2021, 56-72 | with Hong and J. Li
abstract (+)We derive the asymptotic distribution of the parameters of the Berry et al. (1995, BLP) model in a many markets setting which takes into account simulation noise under the assumption of overlapping simulation draws. We show that, as long as the number of simulation draws R and the number of markets T approach infinity, our estimator is √m = √min(R,T) consistent and asymptotically normal. We do not impose any relationship between the rates at which R and T go to infinity, thus allowing for the case of R << T. We provide a consistent estimate of the asymptotic variance which can be used to form asymptotically valid confidence intervals. Instead of directly minimizing the BLP GMM objective function, we propose using Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to implement a Laplace-type estimator which is asymptotically equivalent to the GMM estimator.
supplement (+) wp2019-24_appendix.pdf – Supplemental appendix
Innovative Growth Accounting
NBER Macroeconomics Annual 35(1), May 2021, 245-295 | with Klenow
abstract (+)Recent work highlights a falling entry rate of new firms and a rising market share of large firms in the United States. To understand how these changing firm demographics have affected growth, we decompose productivity growth into the firms doing the innovating. We trace how much each firm innovates by the rate at which it opens and closes plants, the market share of those plants, and how fast its surviving plants grow. Using data on all nonfarm businesses from 1982–2013, we find that new and young firms (ages 0 to 5 years) account for almost one-half of growth–three times their share of employment. Large established firms contribute only one tenth of growth despite representing one-fourth of employment. Older firms do explain most of the speedup and slowdown during the middle of our sample. Finally, most growth takes the form of incumbents improving their own products, as opposed to creative destruction or new varieties.
Missing Growth from Creative Destruction
American Economic Review 109(8), August 2019, 2795-2822 | with Aghion, Bergeaud, Boppart, and Klenow
abstract (+)For exiting products, statistical agencies often impute inflation from surviving products. This understates growth if creatively-destroyed products improve more than surviving ones. If so, then the market share of surviving products should systematically shrink. Using entering and exiting establishments to proxy for creative destruction, we estimate missing growth in US Census data on non-farm businesses from 1983 to 2013. We find missing growth (i) equaled about one-half a percentage point per year; (ii) arose mostly from hotels and restaurants rather than manufacturing; and (iii) did not accelerate much after 2005, and therefore does not explain the sharp slowdown in growth since then.
Numerical Policy Error Bounds for η -Concave Stochastic Dynamic Programming with Non-interior Solutions
Computational Economics 46, (Issue 2), August 2015, 171-187
abstract (+)This paper derives explicit error bounds for numerical policies of η-concave stochastic dynamic programming problems, without assuming the optimal policy is interior. We demonstrate the usefulness of our error bound by using it to pinpoint the states at which the borrowing constraint binds in a widely used income fluctuation problem with standard calibrations and a firm production problem with financial constraints.
Solving the Income Fluctuation Problem with Unbounded Rewards
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 45, August 2014, 353-365 | with Stachurski
abstract (+)This paper studies the income fluctuation problem without imposing bounds on utility, assets, income or consumption. We prove that the Coleman operator is a contraction mapping over the natural class of candidate consumption policies when endowed with a metric that evaluates
consumption differences in terms of marginal utility. We show that this metric is complete, and that the fixed point of the operator coincides with the unique optimal policy. As a consequence, even in this unbounded setting, policy function iteration always converges to the optimal policy at a geometric rate.
Generalized Look-Ahead Methods for Computing Stationary Densities
Mathematics of Operations Research Publication 37 (3), August 2008, 489-500 | with Braun and Stachurski
abstract (+)The look-ahead estimator is used to compute densities associated with Markov processes via simulation. We study a framework that extends the look-ahead estimator to a broader range of applications. We provide a general asymptotic theory for the estimator, where both L_1 consistency and L_2 asymptotic normality are established. The L_2 asymptotic normality implies root-n convergence rates for L_2 deviation.
FRBSF Publications
Labor Productivity in a Pandemic
Economic Letter 2021-22 | August 16, 2021 | with Fernald and Ochse
Future Output Loss from COVID-Induced School Closures
Economic Letter 2021-04 | February 16, 2021 | with Fernald and Ochse
Disruptions to Starting a Business during COVID-19
Economic Letter 2020-25 | August 27, 2020 | with Ochse
Is Rising Concentration Hampering Productivity Growth?
Economic Letter 2019-28 | November 4, 2019 | with Klenow and Naff
Is Slow Still the New Normal for GDP Growth?
Economic Letter 2019-17 | June 24, 2019 | with Fernald
Nonmanufacturing as an Engine of Growth
Economic Letter 2019-03 | January 22, 2019
Missing Growth from Creative Destruction
Economic Letter 2017-31 | October 23, 2017 | with Klenow
What’s Holding Back Business Formation?
Economic Letter 2017-20 | July 10, 2017 | with Kiernan
How Does Business Dynamism Link to Productivity Growth?
Economic Letter 2017-01 | January 9, 2017
