We develop a methodology for identifying departures from relative factor price equality across regions that is valid under general assumptions about production, markets and factors. Application of this methodology to the United States reveals substantial and increasing deviations in relative skilled wages across labor markets in both 1972 and 1992 . These deviations vary systematically with labor markets' industry structure both in cross section and over time.
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Testing for Factor Price Equality in the Presence of Unobserved Factor Quality Diferences
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-22
We develop a method for identifying departures from relative factor price equality across regions that is valid under general assumptions about production, markets and factors. Application of this method to the United States reveals substantial and increasing deviations in relative skilled wages across labor markets in both 1972 and 1992. These deviations vary systematically with labor markets .industry structure both in the cross section and over time.
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Testing for Factor Price Equality with Unobserved Differences in Factor Quality or Productivity
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-32
We develop a method for identifying departures from relative factor price equality that is robust to unobserved variation in factor productivity. We implement this method using data on the relative wage bills of non-production and production workers across 170 local labor markets comprising the continental United States for 1972, 1992 and 2007. We find evidence of statistically significant differences in relative wages in all three years. These differences increase in magnitude over time and are related to industry structure in a manner that is consistent with neoclassical models of production.
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Disentangling Labor Supply and Demand Shifts Using Spatial Wage Dispersion: The Case of Oil Price Shocks
November 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-57
We separate changes in labor supply and demand through changes in higher-order moments of the wage distribution. We illustrate this idea in a study of the effects of oil price shocks, which generate a predictable labor demand adjustment across regions. Empirically, oil price shocks decrease average wages, particularly skilled wages, and increase wage dispersion, particularly unskilled wage dispersion. In a model with spatial energy intensity differences and nontradables, labor demand shifts, while explaining the response of average wages to oil price shocks, have counterfactual implications for the response of wage dispersion. Only shifts in labor supply can explain this latter fact.
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Multi-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.
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Structural Change Within Versus Across Firms: Evidence from the United States
June 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-19
We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to
non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' 'auxiliary' establishments, we develop a novel measure of proprietary in-house knowledge and show that it
is associated with increased growth and industry switching. We rationalize this reallocation in a
model where irms combine physical and knowledge inputs as complements, and where producing
the latter in-house confers a sector-neutral productivity advantage facilitating within-firm structural
transformation. Consistent with the model, manufacturing firms with auxiliary employment pivot towards services in response to a plausibly exogenous decline in their physical input prices.
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Energy Prices, Pass-Through, and Incidence in U.S. Manufacturing*
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-27
This paper studies how increases in energy input costs for production are split between consumers and producers via changes in product prices (i.e., pass-through). We show that in markets characterized by imperfect competition, marginal cost pass-through, a demand elasticity, and a price-cost markup are suffcient to characterize the relative change in welfare between producers and consumers due to a change in input costs. We and that increases in energy prices lead to higher plant-level marginal costs and output prices but lower markups. This suggests that marginal cost pass-through is incomplete, with estimates centered around 0.7. Our confidence intervals reject both zero pass-through and complete pass-through. We and heterogeneous incidence of changes in input prices across industries, with consumers bearing a smaller share of the burden than standards methods suggest.
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The 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.
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Export Prices of U.S. Firms
December 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-42
Using confidential firm-level data from the United States in 2002, we show that exporting firms charge prices for narrowly defined goods that differ substantially with the characteristics of firms and export markets. We control for selection into export markets using a three-stage estimator. We have three main results. First, we find that that highly productive and skill intensive firms charge higher prices, while capital-intensive firms charge lower prices. Second, the very large correlation between distance and export prices found by Baldwin and Harrigan (2011) is largely due to a composition effect. Third, U.S. firms charge slightly higher prices to larger and richer markets, and substantially higher prices to markets other than Canada and Mexico.
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Multiregional Firms and Region Switching in the US Manufacturing Sector
January 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-22
This paper uses data on US manufacturing firms to study a new extensive margin, the reallocation of resources that takes place within surviving firms as they open and close establishments in different regions. To motivate the empirical analysis, I extend existing models of industry dynamics to include production-location decisions within firms. The empirical results provide support for the mechanisms emphasized by the theoretical model. In the data, only about 3 percent of firms make the same product in more than one region, but these multiregional firms are more productive on average
compared to single-region firms, and they account for about two-thirds of output. The results also show that "region-switching" is pervasive among multiregional firms, is correlated with changes in firm characteristics, and leads to a more efficient allocation of resources within firms.
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Materials Prices and Productivity
June 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-11
There is substantial within-industry variation, even within industries that use and produce homogeneous inputs and outputs, in the prices that plants pay for their material inputs. I explore, using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the consequences and sources of this variation in materials prices. For a sample of industries with relatively homogeneous products, the standard deviation of plant-level productivities would be 7% lower if all plants faced the same materials prices. Moreover, plant-level materials prices are both persistent across time and predictive of exit. The contribution of net entry to aggregate productivity growth is smaller for productivity measures that strip out di'erences in materials prices. After documenting these patterns, I discuss three potential sources of materials price variation: geography, di'erences in suppliers. marginal costs, and suppliers. price discriminatory behavior. Together, these variables account for 13% of the dispersion of materials prices. Finally, I demonstrate that plants.marginal costs are correlated with the marginal costs of their intermediate input suppliers.
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