@phdthesis{01J0QQVH20QADHPRVTG4KA7FST,
  abstract     = {{This dissertation is concerned, broadly, with the intersection of Macroeconomics and Political Economy, with a special focus on the role played by firm heterogeneity in shaping economic outcomes. Central to all three chapters is the concept of firm heterogeneity, meaning that firms differ in some fundamental characteristic. For the purposes of this dissertation, the primary characteristic of interest is productivity, a key determinant of firm performance and behavior. This focus reflects a conscious shift from traditional macroeconomic models that often overlook the granularity provided by examining firms of different sizes and productivity levels, and instead rely on the assumption of the “representative firm”. By analyzing these differences, the dissertation aims to illuminate how productivity, as a single characteristic, influences firms’ strategic decisions, market concentration, and overall economic performance.
The first chapter, the sole out of the three to be purely theoretical, proposes a mechanism by which lobbying by Special Interest Groups within an industry can influence its level of concentration, and fleshes out three special cases therein. The second chapter studies the link between concentration and political contributions within the specific context of the economy of the United States, from 1990 to 2018, links the literatures of political economy of lobbying with that of macroeconomic market power, and presents causal evidence of the effect of political contributions on the documented rise in the concentration of economic activity in the U.S. economy. The third chapter investigates the impact of foreign workers on export decisions in a Vietnamese context, with an emphasis on how this impact varies along the firm size distribution, and finds that the presence of foreign workers mostly benefits larger firms in their export decisions.}},
  author       = {{Valdez Quintero, Martín Adolfo}},
  keywords     = {{Economics,Macroeconomics,Heterogenous Firms,Political Economy,Lobbying}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{IV, 39}},
  publisher    = {{Université de Lille ; Ghent University. Faculty of Economics and Business Administration}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{Essays in distributional macroeconomics and political economy}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}