Vertical specialization and international business cycle synchronization

We explore the impact of vertical specialization—trade in goods across multiple stages of production—on the relationship between trade and international business cycle synchronization. We develop a model in which the degree of vertical specialization is endogenously determined by comparative advantage across heterogeneous goods and varies with trade barriers between countries. We show analytically that fluctuations in measured productivity in our model are not linked across countries through trade, despite the greater transmission of technology shocks implied by higher degrees of vertical specialization. In numerical simulations, we find this transmission is insufficient in generating substantial dependence of business cycle synchronization on trade intensity.Business cycles ; International trade

The Extensive Margin of Exporting Products: A Firm-level Analysis

We use a panel of Brazilian exporters, their products, and destination markets to document a set of regularities for multi-product exporters: (i) few top-selling products account for the bulk of a firm’s exports in a market, (ii) the distribution of exporter scope (the number of products per firm in a market) is similar across markets, and (iii) within each market, exporter scope is positively associated with average sales per product. Our data also show that firms systematically export their highest-sales products across multiple destinations. To account for these regularities, we develop a model of firm-product heterogeneity with entry costs that depend on exporter scope. Estimating this model for the within-firm sales distribution we identify the nature and components of product entry costs. We find that firms face a strong decline in product sales with scope but also that market-specific entry costs drop fast. Counterfactual experiments with globally falling entry costs indicate that a large share of the simulated increase in trade is attributable to declines in the firm’s entry cost for the first product.international trade, heterogeneous firms, multi-product firms, firm and product panel data, Brazil

Market Penetration Costs and the New Consumers Margin in International Trade

I develop a new theory of marketing costs and introduce it into a model of trade with product differentiation and firm productivity heterogeneity. In this model, a firm enters a market if it makes profits by reaching a single consumer there and pays an increasing marginal cost to access additional consumers. This market penetration cost introduces an extensive margin of new consumers in firms' sales. I calibrate the key parameters of the model to match data on French firms from Eaton, Kortum and Kramarz, in particular the higher sales in France of firms that choose to export to more destinations. The model predicts that most firms do not export, and that a large proportion of firms that export in particular markets do so in small amounts. These predictions are in line with the French data, but together create a puzzle for models with a fixed cost of exporting, such as those of Melitz and Chaney. Looking at the comparative statics of trade liberalization, I find that the model predicts large increases in trade in goods with positive but little previous trade, in line with Kehoe and Ruhl. The model implies that these increases can contribute to new trade significantly more than the corresponding increases due to new exporters.

The extensive margin of exporting products: A firm-level analysis

We use a panel of Brazilian exporters, their products, and destination markets to document a set of regularities for multi-product exporters: (i) few top-selling products account for the bulk of a firm's exports in a market, (ii) the distribution of exporter scope (the number of products per firm in a market) is similar across markets, and (iii) within each market, exporter scope is positively associated with average sales per product. Our data also show that firms systematically export their highest-sales products across multiple destinations. To account for these regularities, we develop a model of firm-product heterogeneity with entry costs that depend on exporter scope. Estimating this model for the within-firm sales distribution we identify the nature and components of product entry costs. We find that firms face a strong decline in product sales with scope but also that market-specific entry costs drop fast. Counterfactual experiments with globally falling entry costs indicate that a large share of the simulated increase in trade is attributable to declines in the firm's entry cost for the first product

A unified theory of firm selection and growth

This paper develops a theory of firm selection and growth and embeds it into an international trade framework of balanced growth. I assume that firm-level growth is the result of idiosyncratic productivity improvements while there is continuous arrival of new potential producers. Firms can also pay an increasing market penetration cost to sell more to a given market. The model is consistent with a set of salient regularities of firm and exporter selection and growth, as well as the observed distribution of sales. I calibrate the model parameters that determine firm dynamics by looking at the exit rates of a cohort at the US census and the elasticity of trade in Eaton and Kortum. This elasticity is regulated in the model by the firm-level growth process. The calibrated model can account for almost all the turnover and growth of US census cohorts over two decades. It can also account for a large part of the turnover and growth of Colombian exporters in individual destinations

The challenge of trade adjustment in Greece

Greece's trade deficit declined by 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) between 2007 and 2012, removing one of the great economic imbalances of the pre-crisis years. However, this reduction was achieved exclusively through import compression while exports fell over that period, thereby worsening the economic crisis. This chapter studies Greece's export underperformance in comparison to Ireland, Portugal and Spain as well as Greece's own pre-crisis experience. The main findings are that (1) given past performance, Greece's exports should have increased by 25 percent, rather than drop by 5 percent between 2007 and 2012; (2) labor markets have adjusted to the new economic environment; (3) product markets did not adjust, hindering the recovery of competitiveness; (4) export underperformance is responsible for a third of the decline in GDP since 2007. The chapter concludes that the business environment and firm size distribution in Greece are also hindering the necessary adjustment.</p

Aggregate Implications of Firm Heterogeneity: A Nonparametric Analysis of Monopolistic Competition Trade Models

We measure the role of firm heterogeneity in counterfactual predictions of monopolistic competition trade models without parametric restrictions on the distribution of firm fundamentals. We show that two bilateral elasticity functions are sufficient to nonparametrically compute the counterfactual aggregate impact of trade shocks, and recover changes in economic fundamentals from observed data. These functions are identified from two semiparametric gravity equations governing the impact of bilateral trade costs on the extensive and intensive margins of firm-level exports. Applying our methodology, we estimate elasticity functions that imply an impact of trade costs on trade flows that falls when more firms serve a market because of smaller extensive margin responses. Compared to a baseline where elasticities are constant, firm heterogeneity amplifies both the gains from trade in countries with more exporter firms, and the welfare gains of European market integration in 2003-2012

The Extensive Margin of Exporting Products: A Firm-level Analysis

We use a panel of Brazilian exporters, their products, and destination markets to document a set of regularities for multi-product exporters: (i) few top-selling products account for the bulk of a firm's exports in a market, (ii) the distribution of exporter scope (the number of products per firm in a market) is similar across markets, and (iii) within each market, exporter scope is positively associated with average sales per product. Our data also show that firms systematically export their highest-sales products across multiple destinations. To account for these regularities, we develop a model of firm-product heterogeneity with entry costs that depend on exporter scope. Estimating this model for the within-firm sales distribution we identify the nature and components of product entry costs. We find that firms face a strong decline in product sales with scope but also that market-specific entry costs drop fast. Counterfactual experiments with globally falling entry costs indicate that a large share of the simulated increase in trade is attributable to declines in the firm's entry cost for the first product.

Spatial Linkages, Global Shocks, and Local Labor Markets: Theory and Evidence

How do shocks to economic fundamentals in the world economy affect local labor markets? In a framework with a flexible structure of spatial linkages, we characterize the model-consistent shock exposure of a local market as the exogenous shift in its production revenues and consumption costs. In general equilibrium, labor outcomes in any market respond directly to the market’s own shock exposure, and indirectly to other markets shocks exposures. We show how spatial linkages control the size and the heterogeneity of these indirect effects. We then develop a new estimation methodology - the Model-implied Optimal IV (MOIV) - that exploits quasi-experimental variation in economic shocks to estimate spatial linkages and evaluate their counterfactual implications. Applying our methodology to US Commuting Zones, we find that difference-in-difference designs based on model-consistent measures of local shock exposure approximate well the differential effect of international trade shocks across CZs, but miss around half of the aggregate effect, partly due to the offsetting action of indirect effects

The Extensive Margin of Exporting Products: A Firm-level Analysis

We examine multi-product exporters and use firm-product-destination data to quantify export entry barriers. Our general-equilibrium model of multi-product firms generalizes earlier models. To match main facts about multi-product exporters, we estimate our model with rich demand and access cost shocks for Brazilian firms. The estimates document that additional products farther from a firm’s core competency incur higher unit costs, but face lower market access costs. We find that these market access costs differ across destinations and evaluate a scenario that standardizes market access between countries. The resulting welfare gains are similar to eliminating all current tariffs