Misallocation and Asset Prices

Joint with Yan Ji, Di Tian, Pengfei Wang

February 2024

We develop an endogenous growth model with heterogeneous firms facing financial frictions, where misallocation emerges explicitly as a crucial endogenous state variable and plays a significant role in driving 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 consumer welfare. Employing a misallocation measure motivated by the model, we substantiate our findings with empirical evidence showing that misallocation effectively captures low-frequency fluctuations in both aggregate growth and asset returns.