The Empirics of Firm Heterogeneity and International Trade
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-18
Abstract
This paper reviews the empirical evidence on firm heterogeneity in international trade. A first wave of empirical findings from micro data on plants and firms proposed challenges for existing models of international trade and inspired the development of new theories emphasizing firm heterogeneity. Subsequent empirical research has examined additional predictions of these theories and explored other dimensions of the data not originally captured by them. These other dimensions include multi-product firms, offshoring, intra-firm trade and firm export market dynamics.
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.
:
market,
economist,
sale,
commerce,
international trade,
subsidiary,
heterogeneous,
heterogeneity,
multinational,
wholesale,
gdp,
firms export,
outsourced,
globalization,
trading,
trader,
firms trade,
export market
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.
:
National Science Foundation,
Center for Economic Studies,
National Bureau of Economic Research,
Bureau of Economic Analysis,
Foreign Direct Investment,
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,
Harmonized System,
Longitudinal Firm Trade Transactions Database
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 'The Empirics of Firm Heterogeneity and International Trade' are listed below in order of similarity.
-
Working PaperNew Perspectives on the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment🔥
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-17
We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, rms, establishments, and regions. We show that these data provide support for both trade- and technology-based explanations of the overall decline of employment over this period, while also highlighting the di-culties of estimating an overall contribution for each mechanism. Toward that end, we discuss how further analysis of these trends might yield sharper insights.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Surprisingly Swift Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Employment🔥
December 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-59
This paper finds a link between the sharp drop in U.S. manufacturing employment beginning in 2001 and a change in U.S. trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries where the threat of tariff hikes declines the most experience more severe employment losses along with larger increases in the value of imports from China and the number of firms engaged in China-U.S. trade. These results are robust to other potential explanations of the employment loss, and we show that the U.S. employment trends differ from those in the EU, where there was no change in policy.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDoes Firms' Financial Status Affect Plant-Level Investment and Exit Decisions?🔥
January 1999
Working Paper Number:
CES-99-03
This paper investigates the influence of a firm's financial status on the within-firm allocation of funds, reflected in its plant-level investment and exit decisions. In the empirical analysis, financial status is measured by both standard measures and an indicator variable recently suggested by Kaplan and Zingales. Based on these firm-level financial variables and on planet-level investment and production data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database(LRD), econometric models of plant operating regimes are estimated which summarize investment and exit decisions. The empirical evidence supports the view that firm-level financial status affects investments and market exit decisions observed at the plant level.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperDownsizing and Productivity Growth: Myth or Reality?🔥
April 1994
Working Paper Number:
CES-94-04
The conventional wisdom is that the rising productivity in the U.S. manufacturing sector in the 1980s has been driven by the apparently pervasive downsizing over this period. Aggregate evidence clearly shows falling employment accompanying the rise in productivity. In this paper, we examine the microeconomic evidence using the plant level data from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD). In contrast to the conventional wisdom, we find that plants that increased employment as well as productivity contribute almost as much to overall productivity growth in the 1980s as the plants that increased productivity at the expense of employment. Further, there are striking differences by sector (defined by industry, size, region, wages, and ownership type) in the allocation of plants in terms of whether they upsize or downsize and whether they increase or decrease productivity. Nevertheless, in spite of the striking differences across sectors defined in a variety of ways, most of the variance of productivity and employment growth is accounted for by idiosyncratic factors.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperTesting 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.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperFirm Market Power and the Earnings Distribution🔥
December 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-41
Using the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data from the United States Census Bureau, I compute firm-level measures of labor market (monopsony) power. To generate these measures, I extend the dynamic model proposed by Manning (2003) and estimate the labor supply elasticity facing each private non-farm firm in the US. While a link between monopsony power and earnings has traditionally been assumed, I provide the first direct evidence of the positive relationship between a firm\'s labor supply elasticity and the earnings of its workers. I also contrast the semistructural method with the more traditional use of concentration ratios to measure a firm\'s labor market power. In addition, I provide several alternative measures of labor market power which account for potential threats to identification such as endogenous mobility. Finally, I construct a counterfactual earnings distribution which allows the effects of firm market power to vary across the earnings distribution. I estimate the average firm\'s labor supply elasticity to be 1.08, however my findings suggest there to be significant variability in the distribution of firm market power across US firms, and that dynamic monopsony models are superior to the use of concentration ratios in evaluating a firm\'s labor market power. I find that a one-unit increase in the labor supply elasticity to the firm is associated with wage gains of between 5 and 18 percent. While nontrivial, these estimates imply that firms do not fully exercise their labor market power over their workers. Furthermore, I find that the negative earnings impact of a firm\'s market power is strongest in the lower half of the earnings distribution, and that a one standard deviation increase in firms\' labor supply elasticities reduces the variance of the earnings distribution by 9 percent.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperThe Nature of Firm Growth🔥
June 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-30
Only half of all startups survive past the age of five and surviving businesses grow at vastly different speeds. Using micro data on employment in the population of U.S. Businesses, we estimate that the lion's share of these differences is driven by ex-ante heterogeneity across firms, rather than by ex-post shocks. We embed such heterogeneity in a firm dynamics model and study how ex-ante differences shape the distribution of firm size, "up-or-out" dynamics, and the associated gains in aggregate output. "Gazelles" - a small subset of startups with particularly high growth potential - emerge as key drivers of these outcomes. Analyzing changes in the distribution of ex-ante firm heterogeneity over time reveals that the birth rate and growth potential of gazelles has declined, creating substantial aggregate losses.View Full Paper PDF
-
Working PaperA Comparison of Training Modules for Administrative Records Use in Nonresponse Followup Operations: The 2010 Census and the American Community Survey🔥
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-47
While modeling work in preparation for the 2020 Census has shown that administrative records can be predictive of Nonresponse Followup (NRFU) enumeration outcomes, there is scope to examine the robustness of the models by using more recent training data. The models deployed for workload removal from the 2015 and 2016 Census Tests were based on associations of the 2010 Census with administrative records. Training the same models with more recent data from the American Community Survey (ACS) can identify any changes in parameter associations over time that might reduce the accuracy of model predictions. Furthermore, more recent training data would allow for the incorporation of new administrative record sources not available in 2010. However, differences in ACS methodology and the smaller sample size may limit its applicability. This paper replicates earlier results and examines model predictions based on the ACS in comparison with NRFU outcomes. The evaluation consists of a comparison of predicted counts and household compositions with actual 2015 NRFU outcomes. The main findings are an overall validation of the methodology using independent data.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 PaperMANAGING TRADE: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA AND THE US
May 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-15
We present a heterogeneous-firm model in which management ability increases both production efficiency and product quality. Combining six micro-datasets on management practices, production and trade in Chinese and American firms, we find broad support for the model's predictions. First, better managed firms are more likely to export, sell more products to more destination countries, and earn higher export revenues and profits. Second, better managed exporters have higher prices, higher quality, and lower quality-adjusted prices. Finally, they also use a wider range of inputs, higher quality and more expensive inputs, and imported inputs from more advanced countries. The structural estimates indicate that management is important for improving production efficiency and product quality in both countries, but it matters more in China than in the US, especially for product quality. Panel analysis for the US and a randomized control trial in India suggest that management exerts causal effects on product quality, production efficiency, and exports. Poor management practices may thus hinder trade and growth, especially in developing countries.View Full Paper PDF
