Multinational firms colocate production and innovation by offshoring them to the same host country or region. In this paper, I examine the determinants of multinational firms' production and innovation locations. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in tariffs, I find complementarities between production and innovation within host countries and regions. To evaluate manufacturing reshoring policies, I develop a quantitative multicountry offshoring location choice model. I allow for rich colocation benefits and cross-country interdependencies and prove supermodularity of the model to solve this otherwise NP-hard problem. I find the effects of manufacturing reshoring policies are nonlinear, contingent upon firm heterogeneity, and they accumulate dynamically.
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Firm Heterogeneity, Misallocation, and Trade
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-33
To what extent do domestic distortions influence the gains from trade? Using data from Chinese manufacturing surveys and U.S. census records, I document two novel stylized facts: (1) Larger producers in China exhibit lower revenue productivity, whereas larger producers in the U.S. exhibit higher revenue productivity. (2) Larger exporters in China exhibit lower export intensity, whereas larger exporters in the U.S. exhibit higher export intensity. A model of heterogeneous producers shows that only the U.S. patterns are consistent with an efficient allocation. To reconcile the observed patterns in China, I introduce producer- and destination-specific subsidies and estimate the model without imposing functional form assumptions on the joint distribution of productivity and subsidy rates. Accounting for distortions in China leads to substantially smaller estimated gains from trade.
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The Geography of Inventors and Local Knowledge Spillovers in R&D
October 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-59
I causally estimate local knowledge spillovers in R&D and quantify their importance when implementing R&D policies. Using a new administrative panel on German inventors, I estimate these spillovers by isolating quasi-exogenous variation from the arrival of East German inventors across West Germany after the Reunification of Germany in 1990. Increasing the number of inventors by 1% increases inventor productivity by 0.4%. I build a spatial model of innovation, and show that these spillovers are crucial when reducing migration costs for inventors or implementing R&D subsidies to promote economic activity.
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Firm Finances and Responses to Trade Liberalization: Evidence from U.S. Tariffs on China
November 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-37
This paper examines the relationship between a firm's finances and its response to trade liberalization. Using a landmark change in U.S. tariff policy vis-'-vis Chinese imports and micro level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I find larger manufacturing job losses in better capitalized firms - those with less leverage and more cash on hand. The effects concentrate in industries where weaker balance sheets are likely to lead to collateral and other borrowing constraints, helping rule out alternative explanations. Finally, domestic manufacturing job losses are not accompanied by greater reductions in sales or aggregate employment, but better capitalized firms do exhibit reduced input costs and increased productivity. These findings point to offshoring as the predominant firm response to trade liberalization and suggest a role for financial capacity in facilitating offshoring investments.
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Learning and the Value of Relationships in International Trade
February 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-11
How valuable are long-term supplier relationships? To address this question, this paper explores relationships between U.S. importers and their suppliers abroad. We establish several facts: almost half of U.S. imports involve relationships three years or older, relationship survival and traded quantity increase as a relationship ages, and long-term relationships were more resilient in the 2008-09 financial crisis. We present a model of importer learning and calibrate it using our data. We estimate large differences in the value of relationships across countries. Counterfactuals show that relationships are central to trade dynamics.
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Evolving Property Rights and Shifting Organizational Forms: Evidence From Joint-Venture Buyouts Following China's WTO Accession
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-05
China's WTO accession offers a rare opportunity to observe multinationals' response to changes in property rights in a developing country. WTO accession reduced incentives for joint ventures while reducing constraints on wholly owned foreign subsidiaries. Concomitant with these changes was a more liberal investment environment for indigenous investors. An adaptation of Feenstra and Hanson's (2005) property rights model suggests that higher the productivity and value added of the joint venture, but the lower its domestic sales share, the more likely the venture is to be become wholly foreign owned following liberalization. Theory also suggests that an enterprise with lower productivity but higher value added and domestic sales will be more likely to switch from a joint venture to wholly domestic owned. Using newly created enterprise-level panel data on equity joint ventures and changes in registration type following China's WTO accession, we find evidence consistent with the property rights theory. More highly productive firms with higher value added and lower domestic sales shares are more likely to become wholly foreign owned, while less productive firms focused on the Chinese market are more likely to become wholly domestic owned rather than remain joint ventures. In addition to highlighting the importance of incomplete contracts and property rights in the international organization of production, these results support the view that external commitment to liberalization through WTO accession influences multinational and indigenous firms' behavior.
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The Rising Returns to R&D: Ideas Are Not Getting Harder to Find
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-29
R&D investment has grown robustly, yet aggregate productivity growth has stagnated. Is this because 'ideas are getting harder to find'? This paper uses micro-data from the US Census Bureau to explore the relationship between R&D and productivity in the manufacturing sector from 1976 to 2018. We find that both the elasticity of output (TFP) with respect to R&D and the marginal returns to R&D have risen sharply. Exploring factors affecting returns, we conclude that R&D obsolescence rates must have risen. Using a novel estimation approach, we find consistent evidence of sharply rising technological rivalry. These findings suggest that R&D has become more effective at finding productivity-enhancing ideas but these ideas may also render rivals' technologies obsolete, making innovations more transient.
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Pollution Havens and the Trade in Toxic Chemicals: Evidence from U.S. Trade Flows
June 2010
Working Paper Number:
CES-10-12
Does increased environmental protection decrease the emission of pollutants or merely displace them? Using newly available trade data, this study examines the flows of a panel of chemicals designated as toxic by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). Estimates from a differences-in-differences model indicate a significant increase in net imports when a chemical is listed on TRI, which suggests production offshoring. Furthermore, I find that increased imports due to this 'pollution haven effect' are sourced disproportionately from poorer countries, which are likely to have lower environmental protection standards. At the same time, I observe the bulk of American trade in toxic chemicals occurs with other wealthy countries, which may be attributed to the capital intensity of chemical production.
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THE MARGINS OF GLOBAL SOURCING: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM U.S. FIRMS
December 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-47
This paper studies the extensive and intensive margins of firms' global sourcing decisions. We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which heterogeneous firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. The model delivers a simple closed-form solution for firm profits as a function of the countries from which a firm imports, as well as those countries' characteristics. In contrast to canonical models of exporting in which firm profits are additively separable across exporting markets, we show that global sourcing decisions naturally interact through the firm's cost function. In particular, the marginal change in profits from adding a country to the firm's set of potential sourcing locations depends on the number and characteristics of other countries in the set. Still, under plausible parametric restrictions, selection into importing features complementarity across markets and firms' sourcing strategies follow a hierarchical structure analogous to the one predicted by exporting models. Our quantitative analysis exploits these complementarities to distinguish between a country's potential as a marginal cost-reducing source of inputs and the fixed cost associated with sourcing from this country. Counterfactual exercises suggest that a shock to the potential benefits of sourcing from a country leads to significant and heterogeneous changes in sourcing across both countries and firms.
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Competition, Firm Innovation, and Growth under Imperfect Technology Spillovers
July 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-40
We study how friction in learning others' technology, termed 'imperfect technology spillovers,' incentivizes firms to use different types of innovation and impacts the implications of competition through changes in innovation composition. We build an endogenous growth model in which multi-product firms enhance their products via internal innovation and enter new product markets through external innovation. When learning others' technology takes time due to this friction, increased competitive pressure leads firms with technological advantages to intensify internal innovation to protect their markets, thereby reducing others' external innovation. Using the U.S. administrative firm-level data, we provide regression results supporting the model predictions. Our findings highlight the importance of strategic firm innovation choices and changes in their composition in shaping the aggregate implications of competition.
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Global Sourcing and Multinational Activity: A Unified Approach
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-36
Multinational firms (MNEs) accounted for 42 percent of US manufacturing employment, 87 percent of US imports, and 84 of US exports in 2007. Despite their disproportionate share of global trade, MNEs' input sourcing and final-good production decisions are often studied separately. Using newly merged data on firms' trade and FDI activity by country, we show that US MNEs are more likely to import not only from the countries in which they have affiliates, but also from other countries within their affiliates' region. We rationalize these patterns in a unified framework in which firms jointly determine the countries in which to produce final goods, and the countries from which to source inputs. The model generates a new source of scale economies that arises because a firm incurs a country specific fixed cost that allows all its assembly plants to source inputs from that country. This shared fixed cost across plants creates interdependencies between firms' assembly and sourcing locations, and leads to non-monotonic responses in third markets to bilateral trade cost changes.
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