Technological change, from the advent of robots to expanded trade opportunities, tends to create winners and losers. How should government policy respond? And how should the overall welfare impact of technological change on society be valued? We provide a general theory of optimal technology...

We present a theory of Keynesian supply shocks: supply shocks that trigger changes in aggregate demand larger than the shocks themselves. We argue that the economic shocks associated to the COVID-19 epidemic--shutdowns, layoffs, and firm exits--may have this feature. In one-sector economies...

We study the positive (not normative) effect of a permanent import tariff on trade deficits. We consider a two-period trade model with general preferences and technology. We first develop an aggregation result showing one can work with induced preferences over aggregate imports and exports. This...

This note isolates an overlooked economic force for the Ruble to appreciate in response to international sanctions limiting exports to Russia. The economic intuition is that when Russians are unable to buy the mix of foreign goods they wish, then foreign goods becomes less attractive, increasing...

We study the effects of an anticipated dollarization, announced today but planned to be implemented at some future date, in a simple open-economy model. Motivated by the profile of countries considering dollarization we make the following assumptions. First, the government faces a scarcity of...

We analyze the dynamic macroeconomic effects of border adjustment taxes, both when they are a feature of corporate tax reform (C-BAT) and for the case of value added taxes (VAT). Our analysis arrives at the following main conclusions. First, C-BAT is unlikely to be neutral at the macroeconomic...

We provide a nonlinear characterization of the macroeconomic impact of microeconomic productivity shocks in terms of reduced-form non-parametric elasticities for efficient economies. We also show how structural parameters are mapped to these reduced-form elasticities. In this sense, we extend...

Technological change, from the advent of robots to expanded trade opportunities, tends to create winners and losers. How should government policy respond? And how should the overall welfare impact of technological change on society be valued? We provide a general theory of optimal technology...

We present a theory of Keynesian supply shocks: supply shocks that trigger changes in aggregate demand larger than the shocks themselves. We argue that the economic shocks associated to the COVID-19 epidemic—shutdowns, layoffs, and firm exits—may have this feature. In one-sector economies...