Research

Published Papers

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

  • • Economic Policy

    • Online Appendix and Economic Policy Panel Summary

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

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

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

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

    • Methodology appendix

    • Document market concentration and business dynamism in the UK.

• Market Power in the UK (2022) with Kyung In Hwang and Joel Kariel

  • • 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 "Eat Out to Help Out" on Firm Creation (2022) with Yannis Galanakis and Jonathan Hobbs

  • • 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.