It is crucial to consider how profits vary over the life cycle of the firm in order to understand why the aggregate profit share has been increasing while firm entry has been declining. All else equal, the more back-loaded profits are, the lower is the value of the firm due to discounting....

Capital costs are not directly observed since most firms own part of their capital stock. I show how cross-sectional variation in firms' input choices reveals the user cost of capital. Estimating the model using Compustat data, I find that capital costs as a share of output have been declining....

I study the diffusion of technology when the decision to search for productivity-enhancing technologies depends on the network of interactions between agents. Agents have the option to engage in costly learning from their first-degree connections. The more productive an agent's connections, the...

A rise in the aggregate markup can be decomposed into an effect coming from changes in firm-level markups and an effect coming from reallocation of economic activity toward high-markup firms. I show that such a decomposition is heavily influenced by measurement error of firm-level markups. When...

I study mitigation policies during an epidemic when individuals vary in their degree of interaction with others. Individuals with a high degree are more likely to contract the disease and, once infected, they transmit the disease to more individuals in expectation. Thus, the presence of high...