Misallocation and Asset Prices

Joint with Yan Ji, Di Tian, Pengfei Wang

January 2025

We develop an endogenous growth model with heterogeneous firms facing financial frictions, where misallocation emerges explicitly as a crucial endogenous state variable and significantly affects economic growth through the valuation channel. The model illustrates that transient macroeconomic shocks affecting misallocation can yield persistent effects on aggregate growth. In equilibrium, slow-moving misallocation endogenously generates long-run uncertainty about economic growth by distorting innovation decisions. When agents hold recursive preferences, misallocation-driven low-frequency growth fluctuations result in substantial risk premia in capital markets and large losses in welfare. We provide evidence that misallocation effectively captures low-frequency fluctuations in both aggregate growth and asset returns.