Importers, Exporters, and Multinationals: A Portrait of Firms in the U.S. that Trade Goods
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-20
Abstract
This paper provides an integrated view of globally engaged U.S. firms by exploring a newly developed dataset that links U.S. international trade transactions to longitudinal data on U.S. enterprises. These data permit examination of a number of new dimensions of firm activity, including how many products firms trade, how many countries firms trade with, the characteristics of those countries, the concentration of trade across firms, whether firms transact at arms length or with related parties, and whether firms import as well as export. Firms that trade goods play an important role in the U.S., employing more than a third of the U.S. workforce. We find that the most globally engaged U.S. firms, i.e. those that both export to and import from related parties, dominate U.S. trade flows and employment at trading firms. We also find that firms that begin trading between 1993 and 2000 experience especially rapid employment growth and are a major force in overall job creation.
Document Tags and Keywords
Keywords
Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative
keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant
keywords.
By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the
text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but
provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
macroeconomic,
commerce,
import,
export,
foreign trade,
international trade,
subsidiary,
shipment,
exporting,
exporter,
multinational,
foreign,
importing,
wholesale,
firms export,
supplier,
exported,
globalization,
imported,
trading,
importer,
exporters multinationals,
custom,
trader,
exports firms
Tags
Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at
several tasks, including entity tagging.
The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech,
including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are
identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Standard Industrial Classification,
National Science Foundation,
Bureau of Economic Analysis,
Longitudinal Business Database,
World Bank,
Chicago Census Research Data Center,
Postal Service,
Special Sworn Status
Similar Working Papers
Similarity between working papers are determined by an unsupervised neural
network model
know as Doc2Vec.
Doc2Vec is a model that represents entire documents as fixed-length vectors, allowing for the
capture of semantic meaning in a way that relates to the context of words within the document. The model learns to
associate a unique vector with each document while simultaneously learning word vectors, enabling tasks such as
document classification, clustering, and similarity detection by preserving the order and structure of words. The
document vectors are compared using cosine similarity/distance to determine the most similar working papers.
Papers identified with 🔥 are in the top 20% of similarity.
The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'Importers, Exporters, and Multinationals: A Portrait of Firms in the U.S. that Trade Goods' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperWholesalers and Retailers in U.S. Trade (Long Version)🔥
February 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-03
International trade models typically assume that producers in one country trade directly with final consumers in another. In reality, of course, trade can involve long chains of potentially independent actors who move goods through wholesale and retail distribution networks. These networks likely affect the magnitude and nature of trade frictions and hence both the pattern of trade and its welfare gains. To promote further understanding of the means by which goods move across borders, this paper examines the extent to which U.S. exports and imports flow through wholesalers and retailers versus producing and consuming firms.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Margins of U.S. Trade (Long Version)🔥
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-18
Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In this paper, we use detailed U.S. trade statistics to provide a broad overview of how the margins of trade contribute to variation in U.S. imports and exports across trading partners, types of trade (i.e., arm's-length versus related-party) and both short and long time horizons. Among other results, we highlight the differential behavior of related-party and arm's-length trade in response to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperA Long View of Employment Growth and Firm Dynamics in the United States: Importers vs. Exporters vs. Non-Traders🔥
December 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-38
The first experimental product from the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) program -- BDS-Goods Traders -- provides annual, public-use measures of business dynamics by four mutually exclusive goods-trading classifications: exporter only, importer only, exporter and importer, and non-trader. The BDS-Goods Traders offers a comprehensive view of employment growth at firms associated with goods trading activities in the United States from 1992-2019. We highlight three patterns. First, employment is skewed towards goods traders in several ways. Only 6% of all U.S. firms are goods traders but they account for half of total employment. Moreover, 80% of large firms and 70% of older firms are goods traders. Second, exporter-importer firms represent 70% of manufacturing employment and over half of employment in services-producing industries (management, retail, transportation, utilities, and wholesale). Third, goods-traders exhibit higher net job creation rates than non-traders controlling for firm size, age, and sector. Goods traders contribution to total job creation grows over time, rising to more than half after 2008.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperINTRA-FIRM TRADE AND PRODUCT CONTRACTIBILITY🔥
March 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-12
This paper examines the determinants of intra-firm trade in U.S. imports using detailed country-product data. We create a new measure of product contractibility based on the degree of intermediation in international trade for the product. We find important roles for the interaction of country and product characteristics in determining intra-firm trade shares. Intra- firm trade is high for products with low levels of contractibility sourced from countries with weak governance, for skill-intensive products from skill-scarce countries, and for capital-intensive products from capital-abundant countries.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMulti-Product Firms and Trade Liberalization🔥
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-21
This paper develops a general equilibrium model of international trade that features selection across firms, products and countries. Firms' export decisions depend on a combination of firm 'productivity' and firm-product-country 'consumer tastes', both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher-productivity firms export a wider range of products to a larger set of countries than lower-productivity firms. Trade liberalization induces endogenous reallocations of resources that foster productivity growth both within and across firms. Empirically, we find key implications of the model to be consistent with U.S. trade data.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Changing Firm and Country Boundaries of US Manufacturers in Global Value Chains
July 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-38
This paper documents how US firms organize goods production across firm and country boundaries. Most US firms that perform physical transformation tasks in-house using foreign manufacturing plants in 2007 also own US manufacturing plants; moreover manufacturing comprises their main domestic activity. By contrast, 'factoryless goods producers' outsource all physical transformation tasks to arm's-length contractors, focusing their in-house efforts on design and marketing. This distinct firm type is missing from standard analyses of manufacturing, growing in importance, and increasingly reliant on foreign suppliers. Physical transformation 'within-the-firm' thus coincides with substantial physical transformation 'within-the-country,' whereas its performance 'outside-the-firm' often also implies 'outside-the-country.' Despite these differences, factoryless goods producers and firms with foreign and domestic manufacturing plants both employ relatively high shares of US knowledge workers. These patterns call for new models and data to capture the potential for foreign production to support domestic innovation, which US firms leverage around the world.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperAggregation Bias in the Measurement of U.S. Global Value Chains
September 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-49
This paper measures global value chain (GVC) activity, defined as imported content of exports, of U.S. manufacturing plants between 2002 and 2012. We assesses the extent of aggregation bias that arises from relying on industry-level exports, imports, and output to establish three results. First, GVC activity based on industry-level data underestimate the actual degree of GVC engagement by ignoring potential correlations between import and export activities across plants within industries. Second, the bias grew over the sample period. Finally, unlike with industry-level measures, we find little slowdown in GVC integration by U.S. manufacturers.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperMultinational Firms in the U.S. Economy: Insights from Newly Integrated Microdata
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-39
This paper describes the construction of two confidential crosswalk files enabling a comprehensive identification of multinational rms in the U.S. economy. The effort combines firm-level surveys on direct investment conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Register (BR) spanning the universe of employer businesses from 1997 to 2017. First, the parent crosswalk links BEA firm-level surveys on U.S. direct investment abroad and the BR. Second, the affiliate crosswalk links BEA firm-level surveys on foreign direct investment in the United States and the BR. Using these newly available links, we distinguish between U.S.- and foreign-owned multinational firms and describe their prevalence and economic activities in the national economy, by sector, and by geography.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperA Concordance Between Ten-Digit U.S. Harmonized System Codes and SIC/NAICS Product Classes and Industries
November 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-41
This paper provides and describes concordances between the ten-digit Harmonized System (HS) categories used to classify products in U.S. international trade and the four-digit SIC and six-digit NAICS industries that cover the years 1989 to 2006. We also provide concordances between ten- digit HS codes and the five-digit SIC and seven-digit NAICS product classes used to classify U.S. manufacturing production. Finally, we briefly describe how these concordances might be applied in current empirical international trade research.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperConcording U.S. Harmonized System Categories Over Time
May 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-11
This paper: outlines an algorithm for concording U.S. ten-digit Harmonized System export and import codes over time; describes the concordances we construct for 1989 to 2004; and provides Stata code that can be used to construct similar concordances for arbitrary beginning and ending years from 1989 to 2007.View Full Paper PDF
