David Argente
I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University's School of Management, with a secondary appointment at the Yale Department of Economics.
I am also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER, an Associate Editor at the Journal of Monetary Economics, and a Co-Editor at the Latin American Journal of Central Banking.
I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. My research focuses on applied macroeconomics, with an emphasis on monetary economics and product dynamics.
Working Papers
Scalable Expertise: How Standardization Drives Scale and Scope
with Sara Moreira, Ezra Oberfield, and Venky Venkateswaran
Journal of Political Economy, revise and resubmit
Patents to Products: Product Innovation and Firm Dynamics
with Salomé Baslandze, Douglas Hanley and Sara Moreira
Journal of Political Economy, revise and resubmit
Strategic Complementarity = Persistence in Linear-Quadratic Mean Field Games
with Fernando Alvarez and Thomas Sargent
De Minimis as a Constraint on Retail Market Power: Local Catchment Areas and Markup Elasticities
with Esteban Mendez and Diana Van Patten
On the Resilience of Payment Methods
with Fernando Alvarez and Diana Van Patten
Data Centers and Local Economies in the Age of AI: A Shift-Share Approach
with Fernando Alvarez, Joyce Chow, and Diana Van Patten
Price Setting During a Currency Changeover
with Fernando Alvarez, Alberto Cavallo, and Francesco Lippi
Published and Accepted Papers
How New Products Enter Markets: Social Networks, Consumer Imports, and Retailer Learning
with Esteban Mendez and Diana Van Patten
Quarterly Journal of Economics, accepted
Strategic Complementarities in a Dynamic Model of Technology Adoption: P2P Digital Payments
with Fernando Alvarez, Francesco Lippi, Esteban Mendez, and Diana Van Patten
American Economic Review, conditionally accepted
Inferring Prices from Quantities
with Chang-Tai Hsieh and Munseob Lee
Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics, conditionally accepted
Drivers of Digital Payment Adoption: Lessons from Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico
with Paula Gonzalez Alvarez, Esteban Mendez, and Diana Van Patten
IMF Economic Review, 2026
How Do Firms Build Market Share? The Role of Demand Frictions
with Doireann Fitzgerald, Sara Moreira, Anthony Priolo
American Economic Review: Insights, 2025
Consumer Surplus of Alternative Payment Methods
with Fernando Alvarez
Review of Economic Studies, 2025
The Life Cycle of Products: Evidence and Implications
with Munseob Lee and Sara Moreira
Journal of Political Economy, 2024 (lead article)
Are Cryptocurrencies Currencies? Bitcoin as Legal Tender in El Salvador
with Fernando Alvarez and Diana Van Patten
Science, 2023 (research article)
Product Life Cycle, Learning, and Nominal Shocks
with Chen Yeh
Review of Economic Studies, 2022
On the Effects of the Availability of Means of Payments: The Case of Uber
with Fernando Alvarez
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022
Measuring the Cost of Living in Mexico and the US
with Chang-Tai Hsieh and Munseob Lee
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2022
The Cost of Privacy: Welfare Effects of the Disclosure of COVID-19 Cases
with Chang-Tai Hsieh and Munseob Lee
Review of Economics and Statistics, 2022
with Fernando Alvarez, Francesco Lippi, and Rafael Jiménez
Journal of Monetary Economics, 2022
A Simple Planning Problem for COVID-19 Lockdown, Testing and Tracing
with Fernando Alvarez and Francesco Lippi
American Economic Review: Insights, 2021
Cost of Living Inequality during the Great Recession
with Munseob Lee
Journal of European Economic Association, 2021
Cash-Management in Times of COVID-19
with Fernando Alvarez
B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, 2021
Innovation and Product Reallocation in the Great Recession
with Munseob Lee and Sara Moreira
Journal of Monetary Economics, 2018
Work in Progress
From Code to Composition: Personalized Recommendations and Product Innovation
with Maria Trejos, Diana Van Patten, and Kai Hao Yang
Breaking Uniform Pricing
with Marcos Lissauer
Firms' AI Skills and the Direction of Product Innovation