We calculate the implicit inflation tax borne by households due to their holdings of U.S. Treasury debt. Nominal assets lose value due to unexpected inflation. We calculate unexpected changes in current and future inflation and document households’ holdings of Treasury debt across the wealth distribution, accounting for direct and indirect holdings through financial intermediaries. Combining these two pieces of information, we calculate the implied inflation tax across household wealth groups over the past four decades.

We investigate the role supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic played in U.S. producer price index (PPI) inflation. We exploit pre-pandemic cross-industry variation in sourcing patterns across countries and interact it with measures of international supply chain bottlenecks during the pandemic. We show that exposure to global supply chain disruptions played a significant role in U.S. cross-industry PPI inflation between January and November 2021. If bottlenecks had followed the same path as in 2019, PPI inflation in the manufacturing sector would have been 2 percentage points lower in January 2021 and 20 percentage points lower in November 2021.

We investigate the role of global value chains in the declines of manufacturing employment and output in the U.S. during COVID-19. Specifically, we identify the role of global value chains by exploiting heterogeneity across industries in cross-country sourcing patterns and its interaction with exogenous cross-country variation in the containment policies introduced to combat the virus. We find that global value chains played a significant role in the decline of output and employment across U.S. manufactures. Moreover, we find a modest impact of diversifying or renationalizing global value chains in mitigating the economy’s exposure to foreign shocks.

Our novel International Patent and Citations across Sectors (INPACT-S) database tracks cross-border and domestic patent flows across industries over four decades. INPACT-S is more comprehensive than other publicly available datasets along five key dimensions:(i) It encompasses a wider array of patent authorities, offering a full view of global patent activity; (ii) it provides industry-specific bilateral data, allowing to do sectoral analysis; (iii) it captures a greater number of patent applications through imputation methods; (iv) it includes comprehensive data on cross-country and cross-sector citation data; and (v) it includes consistently constructed data on cross-border and domestic patents.

We study how international tax systems shape the global allocation of intangible assets. Firm-level data show that cross-border patent ownership transfers respond strongly to tax differentials, especially within multinational firms, while arm’s-length transfers are more closely associated with intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. We develop a model in which patent owners choose whether to license, sell, or transfer patents to a foreign affiliate, linking tax rates, IPR protection and transfer-pricing wedges to patent location. Counterfactuals suggest that tax harmonization and stronger enforcement reduce profit shifting and expand the US royalty tax base, whereas a global minimum tax has limited effects.

We build a stylized model that captures the relationships between cross-border patenting, globalization, and development. Our theory delivers a gravity equation for cross-border patents. To test the model’s predictions, we compile a new dataset that tracks patents within and between countries and industries, for 1980-2019. The econometric analysis reveals a strong, positive impact of policy and globalization on cross-border patent flows, especially from North to South. A counterfactual welfare analysis suggests that the increase in patent flows from North to South has benefited both regions, with South gaining more than North post-2000, thus lowering real income inequality in the world.

This project develops a theory of which topics a central bank should talk about, and how clearly, when both communicating and understanding are costly for the public.

This project studies how the tax code and patent law should be designed together when the returns to intangible ‘sweat equity’ cannot be told apart from the returns to savings.