Stepan Gordeev

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Connecticut.

I am interested in macroeconomics, economic development, and growth.

I completed my Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Rochester in 2022.

research

JMP

Nutrition Demand, Subsistence Farming, and Agricultural Productivity

2022

Abstract PDF Slides

In many of the poorest countries, agriculture is unproductive and subsistence farming is widespread. I propose nutrition demand as a mechanism that drives the production decisions of subsistence farmers and ultimately contributes to low aggregate agricultural productivity. I explore this mechanism in a model of farm-operating households facing explicit caloric needs and costly domestic trade, and test the model’s predictions on Malawian household-level data. In the model and in the data, the smallest farmers focus their consumption on obtaining calories and specialize their production in unsold staple crops; medium farmers diversify both their diet and their subsistence production; the largest farmers shift consumption to purchased goods by producing and selling marketable farm products. I quantify the aggregate implications of this farm-level product choice using the model. It suggests that lowering trade frictions enough for the average share of output sold by farmers to reach even 50% would make the country’s agricultural sector 42% more productive. Half of this increase is caused by the mechanically reduced erosion of output, and the other half by a better alignment of individual farmers’ product choice with their comparative advantage rather than their family’s nutritional needs or food preferences.
Intangible Capital, Tangible Misallocation

2020

Abstract PDF Slides

The role of intangible capital in production is growing relative to conventional capital. This paper considers the implications of this shift on the misallocation of inputs across public US firms. I show that ignoring intangibles leads to an overestimation of misallocation costs by 54%. The degree of this overestimation gets worse over time, which explains most of the measured deterioration in allocative efficiency in the US in recent years. I find that misallocation is almost twice as severe in sectors that use comparatively more intangibles as in sectors relying more on tangible capital. I calibrate a variable markup model in which the outcome of intangible investments is uncertain and markups increase with firm productivity. I find that it can generate a significant portion of the measured misallocation.