Contact: m1donald@ucsd.edu
I'm an Economics PhD Candidate at the University of California in San Diego. My fields of research are macroeconomics, international economics and international trade.
Before starting my PhD, I worked at the Research Department of the Central Bank of Argentina and studied Economics at the University of Buenos Aires.
You can find my CV here.
In the past two decades, over 30 countries have implemented tax amnesty policies to encour- age the declaration and repatriation of hidden assets, with the goal of increasing government tax revenues. While previous literature has primarily focused on the fiscal impact, this paper studies a less-explored channel: the financial sector expansion resulting from these policies. We examine the macroeconomic effects of Argentina’s 2016 Tax Amnesty, one of the largest programs for disclosing hidden assets, through the financial channel. This amnesty led to an influx of savings into domestic banks, primarily in dollars, equivalent to 1.4% of GDP. We leverage the heterogeneous exposure of banks and firms to this amnesty-induced financial shock to identify bank and firm-level responses. We find that more exposed banks significantly increased their lending compared to less exposed ones. Firms connected to banks with higher exposure experienced increased borrowing, along with a boost in imports, exports and em- ployment. Our findings reveal that tax amnesty policies can stimulate economic growth by expanding the financial sector, demonstrating effects beyond their direct fiscal impact. These results are particularly relevant for countries with underdeveloped financial systems, where the potential for growth through improved access to capital is significant.
We propose a novel rationale for nationally designed place-based policies: imperfect competition in local labor markets. To outline and analyze the implications of this mechanism for welfare and policy, we develop a spatial equilibrium model where firms have market power in both labor and product markets. Market power in local labor markets distorts the allocation of resources within and across regions, implying different industrial efficiencies and returns to scale across space. Solving the problem of a planner, we show that place-based industrial policy can be optimal even absent redistributional motives, because it addresses inefficiencies arising from market power. Moreover, such policy must be designed at the national level, to account for how an integrated goods market transmits local labor market imperfections across regions. To quantify the importance of our theoretical results, we study the effects of the German place-based policies aimed at eliminating disparities between the Western and Eastern states.
Cross-sectional identification methods are widely used in macroeconomics. A common strategy leverages differences in exposure to aggregate shocks across units to identify key elasticities. Central to this approach is the assumption that, by exploiting only relative differences across units and time fixed-effects, general equilibrium (GE) effects are differenced-out. This ensures the portability (Nakamura & Steinsson 2018) of these estimates. I study the identification challenge that arises when exposure shifters to multiple aggregate variables are correlated across units and these variables co-move over time. In such cases, time fixed effects are not enough to difference-out GE effects. I propose a new framework that decomposes cross-sectional estimates into a portable component and a GE-driven term using cross-sectional and time-series methods. Applying the framework to estimate the U.S. cross-sectional fiscal multiplier, I find that accounting for the GE effects that operate through changes in interest rates dampens the multiplier by an order of magnitude. This finding challenges the view that cross-sectionally identified multipliers are independent from the monetary stance. Finally, I validate these findings with a 2-region NK model and illustrate how regional heterogeneity and monetary policy shape cross-sectional multipliers in the theory.