Federico Huneeus, PhD

Production Network Formation

In studies with C. Arkolakis and Y. Miyauchi, Federico Huneeus is working on how the formation of production network linkages impacts the welfare gains from trade shocks and also how it impacts firm dynamics and inflation. The researchers have developed a model of formation of firm-to-firm linkages based on search and matching and have explored the aggregate and distributional effects of aggregate trade and infrastructure shocks.
During his stay at CES, Mr. Huneeus will also work on his agenda on studying the incidence of distortions, joint with D. Atkin, D. Donaldson and T. Garg (MIT). This project estimates who benefits and who bears the cost of distortions in several markets such as labor, capital, input and output, leveraging a rich administrative dataset from Chile that includes firm-to-firm, firm-to-household, employer-employee, bank-to-firm and ownership relationships. After estimating the distortions in these markets, they will evaluate how those distortions affect consumption and income of households at different points in space and in the income distribution.
Mr. Huneeus’s research focuses on studying the behavior of firms from a micro and macro perspective. He is interested in questions related to inequality, productivity and misallocation. In particular, he has several studies on the role that firm-to-firm relationships play for both micro behavior of firms as well as macro outcomes, using big administrative and survey data combined with quantitative tools mostly from Macro, Trade and IO fields. In fact, his research lies at the intersection of these fields.
As a CES Visiting Scholar, Mr. Huneeus will offer a CES Lecture Series on the Macroeconomic Consequences of Production Networks, covering the basics of models of formation of firm-to-firm relationships. After going through the theory, he will move to the data and describe the basic stylized facts available so far on production networks, concluding with the applications of both the methods, data and theory to different questions typically asked in Macro, Trade, Labor and IO fields.
Federico Huneeus is a Senior Economist of the Central Bank of Chile. He obtained an Economics PhD from Princeton and was a Post-Doctoral Affiliate from Yale. In July 2023, he joined the Economics Department of Duke University as an Assistant Professor.