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Papers Containing Keywords(s): 'affiliate'

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  • Working Paper

    How Shocks Travel: the Cross-Border Impact of Natural Disasters in Firm Networks

    August 2026

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-26-55

    Do the boundaries of the multinational firm shape how shocks propagate through global production networks? We link U.S. Bill of Lading microdata, geocoded natural disaster records, and cross-border ownership data to trace the transmission of exogenous supply disruptions from foreign suppliers to U.S. importers. Exploiting the quasi-random timing and location of natural disasters in a staggered event-study design, we document that disasters abroad generate sharp, persistent export declines at affected suppliers'shocks that propagate downstream, reducing the growth rate of U.S. importers' total purchases by up to 25 percentage points. Transmission, however, is far from uniform: non-MNC buyers contract roughly twice as much as importers belonging to global corporations, and a comparable gap separates arm's-length from intra-firm trade. These patterns point to the internal networks of multinational firms as shock absorbers that attenuate and redirect supply-side disruptions'suggesting that firm boundaries are not merely organizational choices, but also determinants of macroeconomic resilience.
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  • Working Paper

    Trade Within Multinational Boundaries

    July 2025

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-25-46

    We leverage newly linked data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to study transactions within U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs). We show that using administrative data on intrafirm trade allows us to correct for measurement error in survey data and to identify the positive relationship between input-output (IO) linkages and the probability of trade between U.S. parents and their foreign affiliates. We also document the prevalence of intrafirm trade: more than half (three-quarters) of affiliates worldwide (in North America) export to or import from their U.S. parent. Our findings provide strong empirical support for traditional theories of firm boundaries that predict trade between vertically linked units of the same firm, and underscore the importance of accounting for the trade frictions that shape MNEs' regional supply chains.
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  • Working Paper

    Socially Responsible Investment and Gender Equality in the United States Census

    August 2024

    Authors: Minsu Ko, Cynthia Yin

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-44

    With administrative data, we test whether institutional ownership with a social preference is related to employee-level gender equality. We show that the gender pay gap, which is an unexplained part of the lower wages of female employees, does not have a significant relation with socially responsible investments. Next, we show that female directorship strengthens the relation between socially responsible investments and the gender pay gap. When there are female directors, socially responsible investments have a robust correlation with a lower gender pay gap. This is because female directorship alleviates information asymmetry in gender equality.
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  • Working Paper

    How Big is Small? The Economic Effects of Access to Small Business Subsidies

    June 2024

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-24-28

    Industry size standards that determine eligibility for small business subsidies have vastly increased over the past decade. We exploit quasi-random variation in the implementation of size standard increases to study the effects on small firms, subsidy allocation, and industry outcomes using Census Bureau microdata. Following size standard increases, revenues decline for an industry's smallest firms, and they are less likely to survive. We link these effects to a reallocation of government procurement contracts from smaller to larger firms. Consequently, industries become more concentrated and growth declines. These findings highlight the broad economic effects of changing eligibility for small business subsidies.
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  • Working Paper

    Multinational Firms in the U.S. Economy: Insights from Newly Integrated Microdata

    September 2022

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-22-39

    This paper describes the construction of two confidential crosswalk files enabling a comprehensive identification of multinational rms in the U.S. economy. The effort combines firm-level surveys on direct investment conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau's Business Register (BR) spanning the universe of employer businesses from 1997 to 2017. First, the parent crosswalk links BEA firm-level surveys on U.S. direct investment abroad and the BR. Second, the affiliate crosswalk links BEA firm-level surveys on foreign direct investment in the United States and the BR. Using these newly available links, we distinguish between U.S.- and foreign-owned multinational firms and describe their prevalence and economic activities in the national economy, by sector, and by geography.
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  • Working Paper

    Global Sourcing and Multinational Activity: A Unified Approach

    September 2022

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-22-36

    Multinational firms (MNEs) accounted for 42 percent of US manufacturing employment, 87 percent of US imports, and 84 of US exports in 2007. Despite their disproportionate share of global trade, MNEs' input sourcing and final-good production decisions are often studied separately. Using newly merged data on firms' trade and FDI activity by country, we show that US MNEs are more likely to import not only from the countries in which they have affiliates, but also from other countries within their affiliates' region. We rationalize these patterns in a unified framework in which firms jointly determine the countries in which to produce final goods, and the countries from which to source inputs. The model generates a new source of scale economies that arises because a firm incurs a country specific fixed cost that allows all its assembly plants to source inputs from that country. This shared fixed cost across plants creates interdependencies between firms' assembly and sourcing locations, and leads to non-monotonic responses in third markets to bilateral trade cost changes.
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  • Working Paper

    Automating Response Evaluation For Franchising Questions On The 2017 Economic Census

    July 2019

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-19-20

    Between the 2007 and 2012 Economic Censuses (EC), the count of franchise-affiliated establishments declined by 9.8%. One reason for this decline was a reduction in resources that the Census Bureau was able to dedicate to the manual evaluation of survey responses in the franchise section of the EC. Extensive manual evaluation in 2007 resulted in many establishments, whose survey forms indicated they were not franchise-affiliated, being recoded as franchise-affiliated. No such evaluation could be undertaken in 2012. In this paper, we examine the potential of using external data harvested from the web in combination with machine learning methods to automate the process of evaluating responses to the franchise section of the 2017 EC. Our method allows us to quickly and accurately identify and recode establishments have been mistakenly classified as not being franchise-affiliated, increasing the unweighted number of franchise-affiliated establishments in the 2017 EC by 22%-42%.
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  • Working Paper

    Statistics on the International Trade Administration's Global Markets Program

    September 2015

    Authors: C.J. Krizan

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-15-17

    Recent mandates for evidence-based policy choices from both the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government underscore the importance of understanding the relationship between program participation and business outcomes. In this paper, we examine the correlations between participation in an export-promotion program and business outcomes. We use this experience to provide more general lessons learned about combining program data on treatments with Census Bureau micro data that can be used as a control. Note this paper does not evaluate a program, but instead provides critical information about a program. The mission of the Commercial Service/Global Markets program is to help companies either start or increase their exports of goods and services. It pursues this mission through advocacy, events, and counseling. This study looks at a very small part of the overall program. While we cannot rule-out several sources of bias in our results, we do observe several consistent patterns across our models. In particular, program participation is positively correlated with export growth and change and, for small businesses, also with positive employment growth. However, overall, and for large firms in particular, there is a negative correlation with employment growth and counseling. The paper concludes with a 'Lessons Learned' section that highlights areas where measurement can be improved.
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  • Working Paper

    The Real Effects of Hedge Fund Activism: Productivity, Risk, and Product Market Competition

    July 2012

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-12-14

    This paper studies the long-term effect of hedge fund activism on the productivity of target firms using plant-level information from the U.S. Census Bureau. A typical target firm improves its production efficiency within two years after activism, and this improvement is concentrated in industries with a high degree of product market competition. By following plants that were sold post-intervention, we also find that efficient capital redeployment is an important channel via which activists create value. Furthermore, our analyses demonstrate that measuring performance using the Compustat data is likely to lead to a downward bias because target firms experiencing greater improvement post-intervention are also more likely to disappear from the Compustat database. Finally, consistent with recent work in asset-pricing linking firm investment decisions and expected returns, we show how changes to target firms' productivity are associated with a decline in systemic risk, particularly in competitive industries.
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  • Working Paper

    GOVERNMENT TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS* AND PLANT SURVIVAL: THE ROLE OF PLANT OWNERSHIP TYPE

    February 1999

    Authors: Ron Jarmin

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-99-02

    This paper compares the survival rates of plants participating in manufacturing extension programs to nonparticipating plants. Participating plants receive technical and business assistance from one of a nationwide network of extension centers intended to assist smaller manufacturers. Results suggest that plant survival is related to plant size, age, productivity, capital intensity and ownership type. Importantly, the impact of extension services differs across ownership types. Participating in extension increases the probability of survival for single unit plants, but not for multi units. This result is consistent with the notion that single unit plants have less access to information on new technologies and would, therefore, benefit more from technical assistance programs such as manufacturing extension.
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