New Department Working Paper: Jevan Cherniwchan

We have another Department Working Paper from Jevan Cherniwchan joint with Nouri Najjar!

Sample Bias in Decompositions of Economic Dynamics

Jevan Cherniwchan is an Associate Professor and the Spencer Family Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at McMaster University. He is also the past Chair of the Canadian Resource and Environmental Economics Association.

Professor Cherniwchan’s primary research interests focus on the intersection of international trade and environmental economics. He has studied how firm-level responses to trade liberalization and to environmental regulation have contributed to the decline in the emission intensity of the manufacturing sector that has been observed in most advanced economies, how environmental regulations have affected the international competitiveness of exporters, and how international trade and economic growth interact in determining cross-country differences in pollution. His work has been published in leading journals in economics, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Journal of International Economics, and the Journal of Development Economics. His research has been covered in media outlets such as National Affairs, the Boston Globe, the Ottawa Citizen, the Montreal Gazette and the Financial Post, and has been cited in policy reports by the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission. He is the recipient of the 2022 Douglas Purvis Memorial Prize (joint with Nouri Najjar) for an outstanding written contribution to Canadian economic policy.

Nouri Najjar joined us last March as one of our weekly seminar speakers. He is an economist working in the areas of environmental economics, trade, and political economy. Most of his research relates the actions of firms to the environment, often in the context of environmental and climate policy. His work has appeared in outlets such as the Review of Economics and Statistics and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. 

Their new working paper is titled, “Sample Bias in Decompositions of Economic Dynamics”.

Abstract

Decompositions are a common method for quantifying within- and across-agent contributions to aggregate economic dynamics. We show that the standard practice of applying decompositions to sample data yields biased estimates of these contributions, and for common sample designs, these biases can be addressed by reformulating the decomposition as an estimation problem and applying standard statistical techniques. An application to India suggests sample bias meaningfully changes our understanding of how firm dynamics contribute to productivity growth. We also demonstrate our method enables the study of settings traditionally impeded by data limitations, such as productivity and firm dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa.

For the full set of working papers, visit RePEC/ideas.