Research

Published Papers

6. Product Market Concentration and Productivity: Evidence from the UK (2024) with Oluwaseun Aguda, Yannis Galanakis, Jingwei Wu

• • • Fiscal Studies

    • Data methodology appendix and data analysis web app: https://asavagar.shinyapps.io/UK-market-structure/.

    • Product market concentration in the UK is increasing. Higher concentration industries have higher average-worker productivity, but lower average-firm productivity. 

5. Business Creation during COVID-19 (2024) with Saleem Bahaj and Sophie Piton

• • • Economic Policy

    • Online Appendix 

    • Economic Policy Panel Summary and published discussion by Federico Rossi and published discussion by Beatriz González.

    • Business creation boomed during COVID-19.  However, the employment impacts are limited due to the characteristics of new businesses.

4. Revenue Elasticities and Business Cycle Behaviour (2023) with Daisoon Kim

• • • Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control

    • Firm-level revenue elasticity measures are declining in the US. This implies weaker propagation of firm-level productivity shocks.

3. Measured Productivity with Endogenous Markups and Economic Profits  (2021)

• • • Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control

    • Code

    • Endogenous markups and short-run economic profits caused by dynamic firm entry lead measured TFP (Solow residual) to misrepresent underlying technology.

2. Labor Responses, Regulation and Business Churn (2020) with Marta Aloi and Huw Dixon

• • • Journal of Money Credit and Banking

    • Supplementary Appendix

    • Labor responses to technology shocks may overshoot or undershoot their long-run level depending on returns to scale at the firm-level.

1. Firm Entry, Excess Capacity and Endogenous Productivity (2019) with Huw Dixon 

• • • European Economic Review

    • Supplementary Appendix and Code

    • In the short-run absence of firm entry, incumbent firms vary their capacity leading to temporary endogenous productivity effects.

Working Papers

• Scale Economies and Aggregate Productivity (2024) with Joel Kariel

  • • R&R Journal of Economic Theory

    • We develop a theory to explain rising firm-level scale economies with aggregate productivity stagnation.

• Aggregate Market Power with Small Firms: Evidence from the UK (2024) with Kyung In Hwang and Joel Kariel

  • • Under review

    • Aggregate market power measured by weighted, firm-level, price markups is increasing in the UK. The most important component is rising markups in services.

• The Impact of Lockdown Easing and “Eat Out to Help Out” on Company Registrations in the UK (2024) with Yannis Galanakis and Jonathan Hobbs

  • • R&R Small Business Economics

    • The UK's "Eat Out to Help Out" policy subsidized restaurant visitors during the COVID-19 pandemic. It led to an increase in firm creation in areas with participating restaurants across all sectors.

Policy Papers & Notes

• UK COVID-19 Firm Creation Project (below reports now hosted on the project website)

  • Regular analysis of real-time data on company registrations in the UK to get an update-to-date picture of the effect of COVID-19 on business creation.

• UK Business Creation during COVID-19 Lockdown (May 2020) with  Alfred Duncan and Miguel León-Ledesma

• Report 1 (May 2020) and GitHub site with code detail

  • • • • • Media: Financial Times, Kent TV, Telegraph, Kent Blogs.

    • Report 2 (June 2020)

• • • Economics Observatory (June 2020) 

      • • • Media: Telegraph

    • National Institute Economic Review (July 2020) 

    • ESCoE conference poster and 5 min video (August 2020)

• Product Market Concentration in the UK: 2006-2015 (2019) with Kyung In Hwang

  • • Analysis of Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) data on product market concentration in the UK.