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Multinationals Offshoring, and the Decline of U.S. Manufacturing
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-22
We provide three new stylized facts that characterize the role of multinationals in the U.S. manufacturing employment decline, using a novel microdata panel from 1993-2011 that augments U.S. Census data with firm ownership information and transaction-level trade. First, over this period, U.S. multinationals accounted for 41% of the aggregate manufacturing decline, disproportionate to their employment share in the sector. Second, U.S. multinational-owned establishments had lower employment growth rates than a narrowly-defined control group. Third, establishments that became part of a multinational experienced job losses, accompanied by increased foreign sourcing of intermediates by the parent firm. To establish whether imported intermediates are substitutes or complements for U.S. employment, we develop a model of input sourcing and show that the employment impact of foreign sourcing depends on a key elasticity of firm size to production efficiency. Structural estimation of this elasticity finds that imported intermediates substitute for U.S. employment. In general equilibrium, our estimates imply a sizable manufacturing employment decline of 13%.
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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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Learning and the Value of Relationships in International Trade
February 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-11
How valuable are long-term supplier relationships? To address this question, this paper explores relationships between U.S. importers and their suppliers abroad. We establish several facts: almost half of U.S. imports involve relationships three years or older, relationship survival and traded quantity increase as a relationship ages, and long-term relationships were more resilient in the 2008-09 financial crisis. We present a model of importer learning and calibrate it using our data. We estimate large differences in the value of relationships across countries. Counterfactuals show that relationships are central to trade dynamics.
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Cheap Imports and the Loss of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-05
This paper examines the role of international trade, and specifically imports from low-wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor-proportions-inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry-level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics dataset, detailed establishment information from the Census of Manufactures, and transaction-level trade data, we find that rising import competition from China and other developing economies increases the likelihood of job loss among manufacturing workers with less than a high school degree; it is not significantly related to job losses for workers with at least a college degree.
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Task Trade and the Wage Effects of Import Competition
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-03
Do job characteristics modulate the relationship between import competition and the wages of workers who perform those jobs? This paper tests the claim that workers in occupations featuring highly routine tasks will be more vulnerable to low-wage country import competition. Using data from the US Census Bureau, we construct a pooled cross-section (1990, 2000, and 2007) of more than 1.6 million individuals linked to the establishment in which they work. Occupational measures of vulnerability to trade competition ' routineness, analytic complexity, and interpersonal interaction on the job ' are constructed using O*NET data. The linked employer-employee data allow us to model the effect of low-wage import competition on the wages of workers with different occupational characteristics. Our results show that low-wage country import competition is associated with lower wages for US workers holding jobs that are highly routine and less complex. For workers holding nonroutine and highly complex jobs, increased import competition is associated with higher wages. Finally, workers in occupations with the highest and lowest levels of interpersonal interaction see higher wages, while workers with medium-low levels of interpersonal interaction suffer lower wages with increased low-wage import competition. These findings demonstrate the importance of accounting for occupational characteristics to more fully understand the relationship between trade and wages, and suggest ways in which task trade vulnerable occupations can disadvantage workers even when their jobs remain onshore.
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Plant Exit and U.S. Imports from Low-Wage Countries
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-02
Over the past twenty years, imports to the U.S. from low-wage countries have increased dramatically. In this paper we examine how low-wage country import competition in the U.S. influences the probability of manufacturing establishment closure. Confidential data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census are used to track all manufacturing establishments between 1992 and 2007. These data are linked to measures of import competition built from individual trade transactions. Controlling for a variety of plant and firm covariates, we show that low-wage import competition has played a significant role in manufacturing plant exit. Analysis employs fixed effects panel models running across three periods: the first plant-level panels examining trade and exit for the U.S. economy. Our results appear robust to concerns regarding endogeneity.
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Input Linkages and the Transmission of Shocks: Firm-Level Evidence from the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake
September 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-28
Using novel firm-level microdata and leveraging a natural experiment, this paper provides causal evidence for the role of trade and multinational firms in the cross-country transmission of shocks. Foreign multinational affiliates in the U.S. exhibit substantial intermediate input linkages with their source country. The scope for these linkages to generate cross-country spillovers in the domestic market depends on the elasticity of substitution with respect to other inputs. Using the 2011 Tohoku earthquake as an exogenous shock, we estimate this elasticity for those firms most reliant on Japanese imported inputs: the U.S. affiliates of Japanese multinationals. These firms suffered large drops in U.S. output in the months following the shock, roughly one-for-one with the drop in imports and consistent with a Leontief relationship between imported and domestic inputs. Structural estimates of the production function for these firms yield disaggregated production elasticities that are similarly low. Our results suggest that global supply chains are sufficiently rigid to play an important role in the cross-country transmission of shocks.
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The Determinants of Quality Specialization
June 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-15
A growing literature suggests that high-income countries export high-quality goods. Two hypotheses may explain such specialization, with different implications for welfare, inequality, and trade policy. Fajgelbaum, Grossman, and Helpman (2011) formalize the Linder hypothesis that home demand determines the pattern of specialization and therefore predict that high-income locations export high-quality products. The factor-proportions model also predicts that skill abundant, high-income locations export skill intensive, high-quality products. Prior empirical evidence does not separate these explanations. I develop a model that nests both hypotheses and employ microdata on US manufacturing plants' shipments and factor inputs to quantify the two mechanisms' roles in quality specialization across US cities. Home-market demand explains at least as much of the relationship between income and quality as differences in factor usage.
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Identifying Foreign Suppliers in U.S. Merchandise Import Transactions
April 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-11
The availability of international trade transactions data capturing individual relationships between buyers and suppliers permits the answering of numerous new questions governing the economic activity of traders. In this paper, we explore the reliability of two-sided firm trade transactions data sourced from the United States by comparing the number of foreign suppliers from U.S. merchandise import transaction data to origin-country data. We find that the statistic derived from the origin-country data, on average, tends to be 20 percent lower than using the raw U.S. data. Guided by this finding, we propose and implement a set of methods that are capable of aligning the counts more closely from these two different data sources. Overall, our analysis presents broad support for the use of U.S. merchandise import transactions data to study buyer-supplier relationships in international trade.
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THE MARGINS OF GLOBAL SOURCING: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM U.S. FIRMS
December 2014
Working Paper Number:
CES-14-47
This paper studies the extensive and intensive margins of firms' global sourcing decisions. We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which heterogeneous firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. The model delivers a simple closed-form solution for firm profits as a function of the countries from which a firm imports, as well as those countries' characteristics. In contrast to canonical models of exporting in which firm profits are additively separable across exporting markets, we show that global sourcing decisions naturally interact through the firm's cost function. In particular, the marginal change in profits from adding a country to the firm's set of potential sourcing locations depends on the number and characteristics of other countries in the set. Still, under plausible parametric restrictions, selection into importing features complementarity across markets and firms' sourcing strategies follow a hierarchical structure analogous to the one predicted by exporting models. Our quantitative analysis exploits these complementarities to distinguish between a country's potential as a marginal cost-reducing source of inputs and the fixed cost associated with sourcing from this country. Counterfactual exercises suggest that a shock to the potential benefits of sourcing from a country leads to significant and heterogeneous changes in sourcing across both countries and firms.
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