Papers Containing Tag(s): 'Bureau of Economic Analysis'
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Viewing papers 31 through 40 of 227
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Working PaperGlobal 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.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperAgglomeration Spillovers and Persistence: New Evidence from Large Plant Openings
June 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-21
We use confidential Census microdata to compare outcomes for plants in counties that 'win' a new plant to plants in similar counties that did not to receive the new plant, providing empirical evidence on the economic theories used to justify local industrial policies. We find little evidence that the average highly incentivized large plant generates significant productivity spillovers. Our semiparametric estimates of the overall local agglomeration function indicate that residual TFP is linear for the range of 'agglomeration' densities most frequently observed, suggesting local economic shocks do not push local economies to a new higher equilibrium. Examining changes twenty years after the new plant entrant, we find some evidence of persistent, positive increases in winning county-manufacturing shares that are not driven by establishment births.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperThe Matching Multiplier and the Amplification of Recessions
June 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-20
This paper shows that the unequal incidence of recessions in the labor market amplifies aggregate shocks. Using administrative data from the United States, I document a positive covariance between worker marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) and their elasticities of earnings to GDP, which is a key moment for a new class of heterogeneous-agent models. I define the Matching Multiplier as the increase in the multiplier stemming from this matching of high MPC workers to more cyclical jobs. I show that this covariance is large enough to increase the aggregate MPC by 20 percent over an equal exposure benchmark.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperStructural Change Within Versus Across Firms: Evidence from the United States
June 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-19
We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' 'auxiliary' establishments, we develop a novel measure of proprietary in-house knowledge and show that it is associated with increased growth and industry switching. We rationalize this reallocation in a model where irms combine physical and knowledge inputs as complements, and where producing the latter in-house confers a sector-neutral productivity advantage facilitating within-firm structural transformation. Consistent with the model, manufacturing firms with auxiliary employment pivot towards services in response to a plausibly exogenous decline in their physical input prices.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperHas toughness of local competition declined?
May 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-13
Recent evidence on rm-level markups and concentration raises a concern that market competition has declined in the U.S. over the last few decades. Since measuring competition is difficult, methodologies used to arrive at these findings have merits but also raise technical concerns which question the validity of these results. Given the significance of documenting how competition has changed, I contribute to this literature by studying a different measure of competition. Specifically, I estimate the toughness of local competition over time. To derive this estimate, I use a generalized monopolistic competition model with variable markups. This model generates insights that allows me to measure competition as the sensitivity of weighted-average markup to changes in the number of competitors using directly observable variables. Compared to firm-level markups estimation, this method relaxes the need to estimate production functions. I then use confidential Census data to estimate toughness of local competition from 1997 to 2016, which shows that local competition has decreased in non-tradable industries on average in the U.S. during this time period.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperCapital Investment and Labor Demand
February 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-04
We study how bonus depreciation, a policy designed to lower the cost of capital, impacted investment and labor demand in the US manufacturing sector. Difference-in-differences estimates using restricted-use US Census Data on manufacturing establishments show that this policy increased both investment and employment, but did not lead to wage or productivity gains. Using a structural model, we show that the primary effect of the policy was to increase the use of all inputs by lowering overall costs of production. The policy further stimulated production employment due to the complementarity of production labor and capital. Supporting this conclusion, we nd that investment is greater in plants with lower labor costs. Our results show that recent policies that incentivize capital investment do not lead manufacturing plants to replace workers with machines.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperTwo-sided Search in International Markets
January 2022
Working Paper Number:
CES-22-02
We develop a dynamic model of international business-to-business transactions in which sellers and buyers search for each other, with the probability of a match depending on both individual and aggregate search effort. Fit to customs records on U.S. apparel imports, the model captures key cross-sectional and dynamic features of international buyer-seller relationships. We use the model to make several quantitative inferences. First, we calculate the search costs borne by heterogeneous importers and exporters. Second, we provide a structural interpretation for the life cycles of importers and exporters as they endogenously acquire and lose foreign business partners. Third, we pursue counterfactuals that approximate the phaseout of the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (the 'China shock") and the IT revolution. Lower search costs can significantly improve consumer welfare, but at the expense of importer pro ts. On the other hand, an increase in the population of foreign exporters can congest matching to the extent of dampening or even reversing the gains consumers enjoy from access to extra varieties and more retailers.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperA 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.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperFirm Finances and Responses to Trade Liberalization: Evidence from U.S. Tariffs on China
November 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-37
This paper examines the relationship between a firm's finances and its response to trade liberalization. Using a landmark change in U.S. tariff policy vis-'-vis Chinese imports and micro level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I find larger manufacturing job losses in better capitalized firms - those with less leverage and more cash on hand. The effects concentrate in industries where weaker balance sheets are likely to lead to collateral and other borrowing constraints, helping rule out alternative explanations. Finally, domestic manufacturing job losses are not accompanied by greater reductions in sales or aggregate employment, but better capitalized firms do exhibit reduced input costs and increased productivity. These findings point to offshoring as the predominant firm response to trade liberalization and suggest a role for financial capacity in facilitating offshoring investments.View Full Paper PDF
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Working PaperImmigration and the Demand for Urban Housing
August 2021
Working Paper Number:
CES-21-23
The immigrant population has grown dramatically in the US in the last fifty years. This study estimates housing demand among immigrants and discusses how immigration may be altering the structure of US urban areas. Immigrants are found to consume less housing per capita than native born US residents.View Full Paper PDF
