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 reallocation of resources towards more valuable parts of the economy, namely allocative efficiency, is fundamental for understanding aggregate outcomes such as aggregate productivity. Nevertheless, allocative efficiency continues to be a black box. We present a theory that allows to structurally dissect allocative efficiency into an arbitrary partition of the economy. For each of these parts, allocative efficiency evolves according to sufficient statistics of factor shares and distortions in any input of the economy. These sufficient statistics are then aggregated according to a new decomposition of Domar weights. We apply our results to revisit growth accounting and use administrative firm-to-firm and tax data for the universe of formal firms to measure the microeconomic drivers of aggregate productivity stagnation in Chile during the 2010 decade. Aggregate productivity stagnation is almost entirely driven by allocative efficiency. Export activity of mining and domestic activity of retail shape the bulk of this stagnation as factors reallocated to less distorted parts of the economy.