Midwest Macro conference: Jorge Miranda-Pinto

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

"This is definitely a great conference for macroeconomists and graduate students working on research. I could interact with Macroeconomists and students from all over the world (U Chicago, Northwester U, Feds, IMF, Bank of Canada, U Warwick, U de Chile, U Hong Kong, World Bank, etc). I attended very interesting sessions and learned a lot about the frontier of macroeconomic research, e,g. explaining the sources of inequality, monitoring financial institution to control systemic risk, predicting future crisis, etc. I received great feedback on my research, not only during my presentation, but also talking to economists throughout the conference. 

I presented my Job Market Paper "Sectoral Connectivity, Volatility, and Downturns: Lessons From Cross-Country Data". In this paper, I find that in emerging countries higher inter-connectivity among sectors of the economy (density of connections) is associated with higher volatility and sharper macroeconomic downturns. I observe the opposite for the group of developed economies, where denser sectoral connections are associated with lower volatility and milder downturns. I then build a multi sector model that, unlike existing models, has a role for the density of connections in shaping aggregate fluctuations. The key for the model to deliver the facts is that emerging economies have less flexible production technologies (manufacturing-intensive economies) while developed economies have more flexible technologies (service-intensive economies). The model implies that during downturns emerging economies with denser connections face constraints in the use of intermediate inputs, while developed economies with sparser connections face constraints in the use of labor."