Antonio Martner

We investigate the role of multiproduct firms in shaping resource misallocation and its impact on aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Using administrative data on product transactions between all formal Chilean firms, we provide evidence that demand shocks to one product affect the production of other products within the same firm, suggesting that firms engage in joint production. We develop a framework to measure resource misallocation in production networks with joint production, deriving non-parametric sufficient statistics to quantify these effects. Applying the framework to Chile, we find that changes in allocative efficiency explain 86% of the observed aggregate TFP growth for the 2016-2022 period. Ignoring joint production leads to overestimation of changes in allocative efficiency.

We examine how price discrimination in supply chains affects resource allocation and welfare. We document prevalent quantity discounts alongside buyer-specific pricing using Chilean firm-to-firm transaction data. We develop a model with an endogenous market structure where firms can price discriminate using a two-part tariff that matches unit prices found in the data. Relative to linear price setups, nonlinear pricing increases output per firm but reduces firm entry by distorting firm profits distribution. Quantitatively, we find that the output increase effect dominates, resulting in higher welfare in nonlinear prices relative to linear price setups. Our calibrated model suggests that the negative welfare effects of markups under nonlinear pricing are approximately 65% of those under linear pricing, indicating standard linear pricing models may overestimate the welfare costs of market power.

We study the monthly cyclicality of the markup distribution using tax records for Chile. We find that markups (i) are unconditionally countercyclical; (ii) the countercyclicality is heterogeneous along the markups’ distribution; (iii) markups increase in response to a contractionary monetary policy shock, and (iv) firms with higher average markups have more responsive markups to monetary surprises. We calibrate a model of firm heterogeneity with Kimball demands and show that markup heterogeneity affects inflation dynamics. We show that strategic complementarities flatten the Phillips curve through the correlation between market shares and pass-through from marginal costs to prices.

In the presence of distortions, the change in granular technology and reallocation of resources towards more efficient uses, namely allocative efficiency, are the drivers for aggregate productivity growth. Nevertheless, technology and allocative efficiency continue to be a black box. We present a theory that allows for the structural dissection of aggregate technology and allocative efficiency into an arbitrary partition of the economy's final demand. For each group of final demand, technology and allocative efficiency evolve according to sufficient statistics of input-output elasticities, factor shares, and distortions in any input of the economy. We propose a new disaggregated Domar weight using these sufficient statistics. We apply our results by using administrative firm-to-firm tax data to revisit the aggregate productivity stagnation of Chile since 2010. We find that technology accounts for around 40% of TFP growth stagnation, while allocative efficiency explains the remaining 60%. We unpack the stagnation at the industry, location, firm size, and firm export status levels for around 90,000 final demand groups.