Tariff-Jumping Antidumping Duties

Using a newly constructed database, this paper examines the tariff-jumping response of all firm and product combinations subject to U.S. AD investigations from 1980-1990. The results strongly support the hypothesis that tariff-jumping is only a realistic option for multinational firms from industrialized countries. Because many firms subject to U.S. AD investigations and eventual duties do not have these characteristics, tariff-jumping of U.S. AD protection is relatively modest. It may also explain why developing countries have been more concerned about addressing AD protection in the WTO than industrialized countries. While the raw numbers show a high tariff-response rate for Japanese firms, this is due almost solely to the fact that many of these firms have substantial multinational experience, not due to any Japanese-specific response per se. I also find little evidence that certain U.S. Department of Commerce procedures that use information from the domestic petitioners (rather than the foreign firms) to calculate dumping margins has any impact on tariff-jumping responses.

Evolving Discretionary Practices of U.S Antidumping Activity

Previous literature has discussed the procedural biases that exist in U.S. Department of Commerce (USDOC) dumping margin calculations. This paper examines the evolution of discretionary practices and their role in the rapid increase in average USDOC dumping margins since 1980. Statistical analysis finds that USDOC discretionary practices have played the major role in rising dumping margins. Importantly, the evolving effect of discretionary practices is due not only to increasing use of these practices over time, but apparent changes in implementation of these practices that mean a higher increase in the dumping margin whenever they are applied. While legal changes due to the Uruguay Round are estimated to have reduced the baseline U.S. dumping margin by 20 percentage points, the increasingly punitive discretionary measures used by the USDOC almost completely compensated for this decrease by 2000.

Size and Growth of Japanese Plants in the United States

Using a unique database on all Japanese manufacturing plants in the United States, we examine the relationship between plant size and growth for these foreign-owned plants. These plants average sizes are three times larger than comparable U.S. plants and experienced 30 percent growth from 1987 through 1990, while U.S. average plant sizes declined over the same period. Our estimates strongly reject Gibrat's Law for these plants, and suggest that smaller plants grow faster. We also find learning affects plant-level growth. Newer plants grow quicker and previous investments by the parent firm mean slower growth, particularly for automobile-related plants. Both are consistent with inexperienced firms growing faster as they learn.

New Measures of Port Efficiency Using International Trade Data

As the clearinghouses for a major portion of the world's rapidly increasing international trade flows, ocean ports and the efficiency with which they process cargo have become an ever more important topic. Yet, there exist very little data that allows one to compare port efficiency measures of any kind across ports and, especially, over time. This paper provides a new statistical method of uncovering port efficiency measures using U.S. Census data on imports into U.S. ports. Unlike previous measures, this study's methodology can provide such estimates for a much broader sample of countries and years with little cost. Thus, such data can be used by future researchers to examine a myriad of new issues, including the evolution of port efficiencies over time and its effects on international trade flows and country-level growth.

Technology, Agglomeration, and Regional Competition for Investment

The active 'courting' of firms by municipalities, regions, and even nations has a long-standing history and the competition for firm location through a wide variety of incentives seems to have escalated to new heights in recent years. We develop a model that explores technology development by firms that face regional competition for their investment and examine the endogenous determination of regions' policies, firm technology, and agglomeration externalities. In particular, we find that regional competition leads firms to inefficiently distort their research and development efforts in hopes of improving their standing in the competition amongst regions for their investment. This loss in efficiency is aggravated by the agglomeration externalities that are inherently present in many industries. We offer several case studies that provide evidence consistent with our theoretical conclusions.

Inappropriate Pooling of Wealthy and Poor Countries in Empirical FDI Studies

This paper examines the question of whether less-developed countries' (LDCs') experiences with foreign direct investment (FDI) systematically different from those of developed countries (DCs). We do this by examining three types of empirical FDI studies that typically do not distinguish between LDCs and DCs in their analysis. First, we find that the underlying factors that determine the location of FDI activity across countries vary systematically across LDCs and DCs in a way that is not captured by current empirical models of FDI. Second, the effect of FDI on economic growth is one that is only supported for LDCs in the aggregate data, not DCs. Third, the evidence suggests that FDI is much less likely to crowd out (more likely to crowd in) domestic investment for LDCs than DCs.

(WP 2004-01) Inappropriate Pooling of Wealthy and Poor Countries in Empirical FDI Studies

This paper examines the question of whether less-developed countries\u27 (LDCs\u27) experiences with foreign direct investment (FDI) systematically different from those of developed countries (DCs). We do this by examining three types of empirical FDI studies that typically do not distinguish between LDCs and DCs in their analysis. First, we find that the underlying factors that determine the location of FDI activity across countries vary systematically across LDCs and DCs in a way that is not captured by current empirical models of FDI. Second, the effect of FDI on economic growth is one that is only supported for LDCs in the aggregate data, not DCs. Third, the evidence suggests that FDI is much less likely to crowd out (more likely to crowd in) domestic investment for LDCs than DCs

Foreign-Affiliate Activity and U.S. Skill Upgrading

There has been little analysis of the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on U.S. wage inequality, even though the presence of foreign-owned affiliates in the United States has arguably grown more rapidly in significance for the U.S. economy than trade flows. Using data across U.S. manufacturing from 1977 to 1994, this paper tests whether inward flows of FDI contributed to within-industry shifts in U.S. relative labor demand toward more-skilled labor. We generally find that inward FDI has not contributed to U.S. within-industry skill upgrading; in fact, the wave of Japanese greenfield investments in the 1980s was significantly correlated with lower, not higher, relative demand for skilled labor. This finding is consistent with recent models of multinational enterprises in which foreign affiliates focus on activities less skilled-labor intensive than the activities of their parent firms. It also suggests that if inward FDI brought new technologies into the United States, the induced technological change was not biased towards skilled labor.

The Effects of Direct Foreign Investment on Local Communities

The large increase in direct foreign investment (DFI) into the United States in the late 1980s has generated considerable research on why these flows occurred and where these foreign firms located. However, very little has been done to evaluate the impact these foreign firms have on the local communities in which they locate. As a first step in addressing this topic, we use detailed county-level panel data from South Carolina across 5 year intervals from 1980 through 1995 to investigate the effect of foreign manufacturing firms on local labor markets and on the level and distribution of local government budgets. We find that manufacturing employment by foreign firms has a substantial impact on industry wages and county budgets which is significantly different from domestic manufacturing employment. With respect to wages, we find that while increased manufacturing employment generally increases county wages in an average two-digit industry, this effect is more than seven times larger when the employment growth comes from a foreign firm, rather than a domestic one. On the budget side, we find that foreign employment leads to larger declines in per capita revenues and expenditures at the county level, and to significant redistribution of county expenditures away from public school funding and toward transportation and public safety.

Protectionist Threats and Foreign Direct Investment

The recent literature on quid pro quo foreign direct investment (FDI) suggests that FDI may be induced by the threat of protection, and further, that FDI may be used as an instrument to defuse a protectionist threat. This paper uses a panel data set of 4-digit SIC level observations of Japanese manufacturing FDI into the United States in the 1980s to explore these hypotheses empirically. We find strong statistical support for the hypothesis that higher threats of protection lead to greater FDI flows, and post-regression simulations find that a rise in the expected probability of protection from five to ten percent means over a 30 percent rise in next-period FDI flows for an average industry. In addition, there is evidence that non- acquisition FDI by the Japanese had success in defusing the threat of an escape clause investigation in future periods.