Abstract:
The recent empirical evidence shows that plant level dynamics are relevant to explain economic growth. The reallocation of resources across incumbent plants, and the process of entry and exit of plants account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of changes in total factor productivity; aggregate efficiency in turns is the main source of the observed changes in aggregate growth. In this paper we build a stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous plants to study the effect on plant decisions of idiosyncratic and aggregate productivity shocks. Parameterizing the model to represent a developing economy, we analyze the effect of productivity changes on several key macroeconomic variables. Our numerical simulations show that the model accounts for the observed regularities. The model can also be used to study several additional issues related to both, business cycle and long run income levels.