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Multi-Market Contact in International Trade; Evidence from U.S. Battery Exporters
May 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-32
When competitors compete in more than one market they are said to have multi-market contact (MMC). Firms with MMC are more likely collude to avoid cross-market retaliation. This paper investigates the impact of MMC among U.S. battery exporters on the prices they set in foreign markets using confidential export transaction data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. The ability of firms to exploit MMC for collusive gain in international markets can be both detrimental to import-dependent consumers and harder for anti-trust authorities to detect. Motivated by litigation finding evidence of collusive behavior by multi-national battery manufacturers, MMC has an upward effect on export prices set by U.S. battery exporters. These results are robust across different panel regression specifications using different measures of MMC.
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Corporate Share Repurchase Policies and Labor Share
February 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-14
Using census data, we investigate whether share repurchases are responsible for the fall in labor share in U.S. corporations. Recent legislation imposes taxes on share repurchases, motivated by the assertion that share repurchases have led to reduced labor payments. Using several empirical approaches, we find no evidence that increases in share repurchases contribute to decreases in labor share. Top share repurchasing firms since 1982 did not decrease labor share. We also rely on exogenous changes in share repurchases around EPS announcements to pinpoint causality. Policies aimed at improving labor share by discouraging share repurchases will likely not achieve their objectives.
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Starting Up AI
March 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-09R
Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications over the period 2004- 2023, we study business applications (ideas) and the resulting startups that aim to develop AI technologies or produce goods or services that use, integrate, or rely on AI. The annual number of new AI-related business applications is stable between 2004 and 2011, but begins to rise in 2012 with further increases from 2016 onward into the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond, with a large, discrete jump in 2023. The distribution of these applications is highly uneven across states and sectors. AI business applications have a higher likelihood of becoming employer startups compared to other applications. Moreover, businesses originating from these applications exhibit higher revenue, average wage, and labor share, but similar labor productivity and lower survival rate, compared to other businesses. While it is still early in the diffusion of AI, the rapid rise in AI business applications, combined with the better performance of resulting businesses in several key outcomes, suggests a growing contribution from AI-related business formation to business dynamism.
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Accounting for Trade Patterns
February 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-07
We develop a quantitative framework for decomposing trade patterns. We derive price indexes that determine comparative advantage and the aggregate cost of living. If firms and products are imperfect substitutes, we show that these price indexes depend on variety, average appeal (including quality), and the dispersion of appeal-adjusted prices. We show that they are only weakly related to standard empirical measures of average prices. We find that 40 percent of the cross-section variation in comparative advantage, and 90 percent of the time-series variation, is accounted for by variety and average appeal, with less than 10 percent attributed to average prices.
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Productivity Dispersion and Structural Change in Retail Trade
December 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-60R
The retail sector has changed from a sector full of small firms to one dominated by large, national firms. We study how this transformation has impacted productivity levels, growth, and dispersion between 1987 and 2017. We describe this transformation using three overlapping phases: expansion (1980s and 1990s), consolidation (2000s), and stagnation (2010s). We document five findings that help us understand these phases. First, productivity growth was high during the consolidation phase but has fallen more recently. Second, entering establishments drove productivity growth during the expansion phase, but continuing establishments have increased in importance more recently. Third, national chains have more productive establishments than single-unit firms on average, but some single-unit establishments are highly productive. Fourth, productivity dispersion is significant and increasing over time. Finally, more productive firms pay higher wages and grow more quickly. Together, these results suggest that the increasing importance of large national retail firms has been an important driver of productivity and wage growth in the retail sector.
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Local and National Concentration Trends in Jobs and Sales: The Role of Structural Transformation
November 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-59
National U.S. industrial concentration rose between 1992-2017. Simultaneously, the Herfindhahl Index of local (six-digit-NAICS by county) employment concentration fell. This divergence between national and local employment concentration is due to structural transformation. Both sales and employment concentration rose within industry-by-county cells. But activity shifted from concentrated Manufacturing towards relatively un-concentrated Services. A stronger between-sector shift in employment relative to sales explains the fall in local employment concentration. Had sectoral employment shares remained at their 1992 levels, average local employment concentration would have risen by 9% by 2017 rather than falling by 7%.
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Quality Adjustment at Scale: Hedonic vs. Exact Demand-Based Price Indices
June 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-26
This paper explores alternative methods for adjusting price indices for quality change at scale. These methods can be applied to large-scale item-level transactions data that in cludes information on prices, quantities, and item attributes. The hedonic methods can take into account the changing valuations of both observable and unobservable charac teristics in the presence of product turnover. The paper also considers demand-based approaches that take into account changing product quality from product turnover and changing appeal of continuing products. The paper provides evidence of substantial quality-adjustment in prices for a wide range of goods, including both high-tech consumer products and food products.
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On The Role of Trademarks: From Micro Evidence to Macro Outcomes
March 2023
Working Paper Number:
CES-23-16R
What are the effects of trademarks on the U.S. economy? Evidence from comprehensive micro data on trademark registrations and outcomes for U.S. employer firms suggests that trademarks protect firm value and are linked to higher firm growth and marketing activity. Motivated by this evidence, trademarks are introduced in a general equilibrium framework to quantify their aggregate effects. Firms invest in product quality and engage in both informative and persuasive advertising to build a customer base subject to depreciation. Persuasive advertising induces a perception of higher quality. Firms can register trademarks to reduce customer depreciation and enhance product awareness. The model's predictions about trademark registrations, firm growth, and advertising expenditures align with the empirical evidence. The analysis shows that, compared to the counterfactual economy without trademarks, the U.S. economy with trademarks generates higher average product quality but lower variety, ultimately resulting in greater welfare and higher industry concentration. While informative advertising improves welfare, persuasive advertising reduces it. Nevertheless, the positive welfare impact of trademarks outweighs the negative effects of persuasive advertising.
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Rising Markups or Changing Technology?
September 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-38R
Recent evidence suggests the U.S. business environment is changing, with rising market concentration and markups. The most prominent and extensive evidence backs out firm-level markups from the first-order conditions for variable factors. The markup is identified as the ratio of the variable factor's output elasticity to its cost share of revenue. Our analysis starts from this indirect approach, but we exploit a long panel of manufacturing establishments to permit output elasticities to vary to a much greater extent - relative to the existing literature - across establishments within the same industry over time. With our more detailed estimates of output elasticities, the measured increase in markups is substantially dampened, if not eliminated, for U.S. manufacturing. As supporting evidence, we relate differences in the markups' patterns to observable changes in technology (e.g., computer investment per worker, capital intensity, diversification to non-manufacturing) and find patterns in support of changing technology as the driver of those differences.
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U.S. Market Concentration and Import Competition
August 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-34
Many studies have documented that market concentration has risen among U.S. firms in recent decades. In this paper, we show that this rise in concentration was accompanied by tougher product market competition due to the entry of foreign competitors. Using confidential census data covering the universe of all firm sales in the U.S. manufacturing sector, we find that rising import competition increased concentration among U.S. firms by reallocating sales from smaller to larger U.S. firms and by causing firm exit. However, this increase in concentration was counteracted by the expansion of foreign firms, which reduced domestic firms' share of the U.S. market inclusive of foreign firms' sales. We find that once the sales of foreign exporters are taken into account, U.S. marketconcentration in manufacturing was stable between 1992 and 2012.
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