Three Essays in Macroeconomics

This thesis collects three papers studying topics related to financial frictions and macroeconomics. In Chapter 1, I study how rating agencies affect liquidity and welfare in over-the-counter (OTC) asset markets. My main finding is that when assets are rated matters for welfare and liquidity: When sellers rate the asset prior to matching, then ratings can improve liquidity but their use is fragile. However, a better arrangement is to rate the asset after buyers and sellers meet. Although this arrangement eliminates liquidity distortions and improves welfare, it is difficult to sustain if buyers are not incentivized to follow through with rating the asset. Buyers can overcome this commitment problem by constructing a semi-pooling equilibrium. I use my framework to show that policies that support buyers purchasing ratings can substantially improve market liquidity. In Chapter 2, I propose that an important channel through which financial frictions adversely impact aggregate productivity is by hindering the discovery of productive entrepreneurs. I develop a model where households have imperfect information about the quality of their business idea and show how financial frictions arising from weak contract enforcement systematically reduce access to capital for poor households with good ideas, which undermines their incentive to learn. After calibrating the model to US data, I find that with imperfect information, total factor productivity (TFP) falls by 23% when contract enforcement is lowered to developing country levels, compared to 12% with perfect information. Half of the productivity loss in the economy with imperfect information is due to financial frictions hindering the discovery of good ideas by poor households. I find that these losses can be substantially mitigated by subsidizing young entrepreneurs. In Chapter 3, I present ongoing work with Chaoran Chen and Xiaodong Zhu examining the joint role of financial and managerial frictions in explaining factor misallocation and lower productivity in developing countries. We present a model where weak contract enforcement prevents productive firms from hiring outside managers and expanding production in developing countries, and show that its key features are consistent with cross-country evidence from the IPUMS-International dataset.Ph.D