Welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Oregon. I received my PhD in Economics from Northwestern University in 2020 and I was a Visiting Fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in 2020/21.
My research interests focus on Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics, Business Cycles, Firm Dynamics, and Household Consumption.
Emails: jcarreno@uoregon.edu
josecarreno.econ@gmail.com
Curriculum Vitae
Working Papers
“Housing Booms and the U.S. Productivity Puzzle”
Abstract: The United States has been experiencing a slowdown in productivity growth for more than a decade. I exploit geographic variation across U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) to investigate the link between the 2006-2012 decline in house prices (the housing bust) and the productivity slowdown. Instrumental variable estimates support a causal relationship between the housing bust and the productivity slowdown. The results imply that one standard deviation decline in house prices translates into an increment of the productivity gap—i.e. how much an MSA would have to grow to catch up with the trend—by 6.9p.p., where the average gap is 14.51%. Using a newly-constructed capital expenditures measure at the MSA level, I find that the long investment slump that came out of the Great Recession explains a large fraction of this effect. Next, I document that the housing bust led to the investment slump and, ultimately, the productivity slowdown, mostly through the collapse in consumption expenditures that followed the bust. Lastly, I construct a quantitative general equilibrium model that rationalizes these empirical findings, and find that this mechanism is behind roughly 50 percent of the productivity slowdown.
“Market Concentration and the Transmission of Monetary Policy”
Abstract: This paper examines the role of market concentration in the transmission of monetary policy. I use a detailed panel of Spanish manufacturing firms to test for heterogeneity in the price and output elasticities to monetary policy shocks across the degree of market concentration. I carry out a VAR identification of monetary policy shocks in the eurozone, and I document four novel facts: (a) the price elasticity with respect to monetary policy shocks is close to zero for firms with insignificant pre-sample market share, whereas these firms have a large output elasticity; (b) the price elasticity increases substantially and quickly along with the degree of pre-sample market share; (c) the output elasticity largely decreases along with the market share dimension, mirroring the increase in the price elasticity; (d) after controlling for market share, firm size has not a significant impact, but firm leverage still plays an important role, as price responses tend to concentrate more on low leverage firms with significant market shares. A complementary analysis based on the frequency and size of price adjustment matches these patterns. Taken together –especially in a context where market shares have been steadily increasing over time– these results strongly suggest that monetary policy makers should track market concentration.