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.
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A 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.
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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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Importers, Exporters, and Multinationals: A Portrait of Firms in the U.S. that Trade Goods
October 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-20
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.
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Recall and Response: Relationship Adjustments to Adverse Information Shocks
March 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-13R
How resilient are U.S. buyer-foreign supplier relationships to new information about product defects? We construct a novel dataset of U.S. consumer-product recalls sourced from foreign suppliers between 1995 and 2013. Using an event-study approach, we find that compared to control relationships, buyers that experience recalls temporarily reduce their probability of trading with the suppliers of the recalled products by 17%. The reduction is much larger for new than established buyer'supplier relationships. Buyers that experience a recall are more likely to add other suppliers to their portfolios, diversifying supplier-specific risk in the aftermath of a recall; this effect, too, is larger for buyers impacted by recalls in new relationships. There is a long lag ' up to two years ' before diversification, consistent with a high cost of establishing new relationships.
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A FIRST STEP TOWARDS A GERMAN SYNLBD: CONSTRUCTING A GERMAN LONGITUDINAL BUSINESS DATABASE
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-13
One major criticism against the use of synthetic data has been that the efforts necessary to generate useful synthetic data are so in- tense that many statistical agencies cannot afford them. We argue many lessons in this evolving field have been learned in the early years of synthetic data generation, and can be used in the development of new synthetic data products, considerably reducing the required in- vestments. The final goal of the project described in this paper will be to evaluate whether synthetic data algorithms developed in the U.S. to generate a synthetic version of the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) can easily be transferred to generate a similar data product for other countries. We construct a German data product with infor- mation comparable to the LBD - the German Longitudinal Business Database (GLBD) - that is generated from different administrative sources at the Institute for Employment Research, Germany. In a fu- ture step, the algorithms developed for the synthesis of the LBD will be applied to the GLBD. Extensive evaluations will illustrate whether the algorithms provide useful synthetic data without further adjustment. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide access to multiple synthetic datasets similar to the SynLBD at Cornell to enable comparative studies between countries. The Synthetic GLBD is a first step towards that goal.
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Aggregation 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.
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Identifying U.S. Merchandise Traders: Integrating Customs Transactions with Business Administrative Data
September 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-28
This paper describes the construction of the Longitudinal Firm Trade Transactions Database (LFTTD) enabling the identification of merchandise traders - exporters and importers - in the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Register (BR). The LFTTD links merchandise export and import transactions from customs declaration forms to the BR beginning in 1992 through the present. We employ a combination of deterministic and probabilistic matching algorithms to assign a unique firm identifier in the BR to a merchandise export or import transaction record. On average, we match 89 percent of export and import values to a firm identifier. In 1992, we match 79 (88) percent of export (import) value; in 2017, we match 92 (96) percent of export (import) value. Trade transactions in year t are matched to years between 1976 and t+1 of the BR. On average, 94 percent of the trade value matches to a firm in year t of the BR. The LFTTD provides the most comprehensive identification of and the foundation for the analysis of goods trading firms in the U.S. economy.
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Accounting for the New Gains from Trade Liberalization
March 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-14
We measure the "new" gains from trade reaped by Canada as a result of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA). We think of the "new" gains from trade of a country as all welfare effects pertaining to changes in the set of firms serving that country as emphasized in the so-called "new" trade literature. To this end, we first develop an exact decomposition of the gains from trade which separates "traditional" and "new" gains. We then apply this decomposition using Canadian and US micro data and find that the "new" welfare effects of CUSFTA on Canada were negative.
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Wholesalers 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.
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IMPROVING THE SYNTHETIC LONGITUDINAL BUSINESS DATABASE
February 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-12
In most countries, national statistical agencies do not release establishment-level business microdata, because doing so represents too large a risk to establishments' confidentiality. Agencies potentially can manage these risks by releasing synthetic microdata, i.e., individual establishment records simulated from statistical models de- signed to mimic the joint distribution of the underlying observed data. Previously, we used this approach to generate a public-use version'now available for public use'of the U. S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), a longitudinal cen- sus of establishments dating back to 1976. While the synthetic LBD has proven to be a useful product, we now seek to improve and expand it by using new synthesis models and adding features. This article describes our efforts to create the second generation of the SynLBD, including synthesis procedures that we believe could be replicated in other contexts.
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