Research on Productivity, Trade, and Growth

This course provides a self-contained set of lectures to bring PhD students and practitioners up to speed in the area of empirical research using firm-level data. The course starts with an introduction to models of firm dynamics and innovation. Next, attention is paid to estimation of productivity, including methods to cope with sample selection, endogeneity of inputs, and lack of firm-level quality adjusted prices. The insights from production function estimation are used to develop a framework to estimate markups using the so-called production approach. This framework is used to discuss the recent debate around rising market power. Finally, the course discusses recent empirical work on structural modeling of productivity, trade and growth. Besides theory, the course will include a set of lectures on data handling, programming, and algorithms for empirical applications, as well as daily hands-on practical sessions. To enroll, students are expected to have finished first-year PhD economics and econometrics courses and have some experience in applied research.