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Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'trading'

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Longitudinal Firm Trade Transactions Database - 29

Longitudinal Business Database - 17

Harmonized System - 16

North American Industry Classification System - 15

Center for Economic Studies - 14

National Science Foundation - 13

National Bureau of Economic Research - 13

World Bank - 13

Ordinary Least Squares - 12

Bureau of Economic Analysis - 12

Census of Manufacturing Firms - 8

Census Bureau Disclosure Review Board - 7

Michigan Institute for Data Science - 7

Census of Manufactures - 7

Customs and Border Protection - 7

Standard Industrial Classification - 7

Federal Reserve System - 6

Disclosure Review Board - 6

World Trade Organization - 6

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - 6

Total Factor Productivity - 6

Federal Statistical Research Data Center - 5

Federal Reserve Bank - 5

Employer Identification Numbers - 5

Bureau of Labor Statistics - 5

Board of Governors - 4

International Trade Commission - 4

County Business Patterns - 4

Internal Revenue Service - 4

Business Register - 4

Special Sworn Status - 4

University of Chicago - 4

Foreign Direct Investment - 4

Research Data Center - 4

Federal Register - 3

Herfindahl Hirschman Index - 3

Business Dynamics Statistics - 3

Postal Service - 3

Census Bureau Business Register - 3

European Union - 3

North American Free Trade Agreement - 3

Annual Survey of Manufactures - 3

Harvard University - 3

Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies - 3

Census Industry Code - 3

Journal of International Economics - 3

Boston Research Data Center - 3

North American Industry Classi - 3

Heckscher-Ohlin - 3

Viewing papers 1 through 10 of 37


  • Working Paper

    Exploring the Hiring, Pay, and Trading Patterns of U.S. Firms: The Dominance of Multinationals Engaged in Related-Party Trade

    December 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-77

    We link U.S. job records with both firm-level business register and customs records to construct a novel set of summary statistics and descriptive regressions that highlight the central role played by the small set of multinational firms (denoted RP XM firms) who engage in both importing and exporting with related parties in translating international trade shocks to shifts in labor demand. We find that RP XM firms 1) dominate trade volumes; 2) account for very disproportionate shares of national employment and payroll; 3) employ greater shares of workers in higher pay deciles; 4) disproportionately poach other firms' high paid workers; 5) offer higher raises to their existing workers. These hiring and pay patterns generally exist even among new RP XM firms, but strengthen with RP XM tenure, and continue to hold, albeit at smaller magnitudes, after conditioning on standard proxies for firm and worker productivity. Taken together, these findings reveal that RP XM status is a reliable proxy for the kind of firm that drives the initial labor market impacts of trade shocks, and that high paid workers are likely to be most directly exposed to such shocks.
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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    Supply Chain Adjustments to Tariff Shocks: Evidence from Firm Trade Linkages in the 2018-2019 U.S. Trade War

    August 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-43

    We use the 2018-2019 U.S. trade war to examine how supply chains adjustments to a tariff cost shock affect imports and exports. Using confidential firm-trade linked data, we show that the decline in imports of tariffed goods was driven by discontinuations of U.S. buyer'foreign supplier relationships, reduced formation of new relationships, and exits by U.S. firms from import markets altogether. However, tariffed products where imports were concentrated in fewer suppliers had a smaller decline in import growth. We then construct measures of export exposure to import tariffs by linking tariffs paid by importing firms to their exported products. We find that the most exposed products had lower exports in 2018-2019, with most of the impact occurring in 2019.
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  • Working Paper

    The Rise of Specialized Firms

    February 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-06

    This paper studies firm diversification over 6-digit NAICS industries in U.S. manufacturing. We find that firms specializing in fewer industries now account for a substantially greater share of production than 40 years ago. This reallocation is a key driver of rising industry concentration. Specialized firms have displaced diversified firms among industry leaders'absent this reallocation concentration would have decreased. We then provide evidence that specialized firms produce higher-quality goods: specialized firms tend to charge higher unit prices and are more insulated against Chinese import competition. Based on our empirical findings, we propose a theory in which growth shifts demand toward specialized, high-quality firms, which eventually increases concentration. We conclude that one should expect rising industry concentration in a growing economy.
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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    A 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.
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  • Working Paper

    A Search and Learning Model of Export Dynamics

    August 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-17

    Exporting abroad is much harder than selling at home, and overcoming hurdles to exporting takes time. Our goal is to identify specific barriers to exporting and to measure their importance. We develop a model of firm-level export dynamics that features costly customer search, network effects in finding buyers, and learning about product appeal. Fitting the model to customs records of U.S. imports of manufactures from Colombia we replicate patterns of exporter maturation. A potentially valuable intangible asset of a firm is its customer base and knowledge of a market. Our model delivers some striking estimates of what such assets are worth. Averaging across active exporters, the loss from total market amnesia (losing its current U.S. customer base along with its accumulated knowledge of product appeal) is US$ 3.4 million, about 34 percent of the value of exporting overall. About half is the loss of future sales to existing customers while the rest is the cost of relearning its appeal in the market and reestablishing visibility as an exporter. Given the importance of search, learning, and visibility, the 5-year response of total export sales to an exchange rate shock exceeds the 1-year response by about 40 percent.
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  • Working Paper

    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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  • Working Paper

    Rising Import Tariffs, Falling Export Growth: When Modern Supply Chains Meet Old-Style Protectionism

    January 2020

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-20-01

    We examine the impacts of the 2018-2019 U.S. import tariff increases on U.S. export growth through the lens of supply chain linkages. Using 2016 confidential firm-trade linked data, we document the implied incidence and scope of new import tariffs. Firms that eventually faced tariff increases on their imports accounted for 84% of all exports and represented 65% of manufacturing employment. For all affected firms, the implied cost is $900 per worker in new duties. To estimate the effect on U.S. export growth, we construct product-level measures of import tariff exposure of U.S. exports from the underlying firm micro data. More exposed products experienced 2 percentage point lower growth relative to products with no exposure. The decline in exports is equivalent to an ad valorem tariff on U.S. exports of almost 2% for the typical product and almost 4% for products with higher than average exposure.
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  • Working Paper

    Do Institutions Determine Economic Geography? Evidence from the Concentration of Foreign Suppliers

    February 2019

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-19-05

    Do institutions shape the geographic concentration of industrial activity? We explore this question in an international trade setting by examining the relationship between country-level institutions and patterns of spatial concentration of global sourcing. A priori, weak institutions could be associated with either dispersed or concentrated sourcing. We exploit location and transaction data on imports by U.S. firms and adapt the Ellison and Glaeser (1997) index to construct a product-country-specific measure of supplier concentration for U.S. importers. Results show that U.S. importers source in a more spatially concentrated manner from countries with weaker contract enforcement. We find support for the idea that, where formal contract enforcement is weak, local supplier networks compensate by sharing information to facilitate matching and transactions.
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