Corporate Acquisitions and Firm-level Uncertainty: Domestic versus Cross-Border Deals

This paper studies the impact of corporate acquisitions on the uncertainty faced by acquiring firms. We use data for UK public companies from 2004 to 2017 and employ a matching estimator combined with difference-in-differences to control for the endogenous selection of firms into acquiring status. Acquisitions exert a large and persistent effect on the volatility of stock returns of acquirers and is characterized by a pecking order: domestic takeovers lead to a reduction in the uncertainty faced by the acquirer, while cross-border acquisitions|particularly those involving target firms in emerging markets|engender a positive response in acquirers' volatility

Global Engagement and Returns Volatility

This paper finds that a greater reliance on foreign market sales increases the volatility of firms’ stock returns, using high-frequency data for publicly listed Japanese manufacturing firms over the period 2000–10. The two margins of global engagement we consider, namely, exports and sales via foreign affiliates (horizontal foreign direct investment), have both a positive and economically significant effect on firm-level volatility. We find, however, that increasing the intensity of sales through foreign affiliates has a stronger effect on volatility than a similar change in export intensity. We also uncover evidence consistent with the notion that firms’ need to use external finance to cover the substantial costs involved in reaching foreign consumers can be an important channel through which firms’ participation in international markets increases their exposure to economic uncertainty

On the Well-posedness for the Chen-Lee equation in periodic Sobolev spaces

We prove that the initial value problem associated to a perturbation of the Benjamin-Ono equation or Chen-Lee equation $u_t+uu_x+\beta \mathcal{H}u_{xx}+\eta (\mathcal{H}u_x - u_{xx})=0$, where $x\in \mathbb{T}$, $t> 0$, $\eta >0$ and $\mathcal{H}$ denotes the usual Hilbert transform, is locally and globally well-posed in the Sobolev spaces $H^s(\mathbb{T})$ for any $s>-\frac{1}{2}$. We also prove some ill-posedness issues when $s<-1$.Comment: 15 page

Subsidies with Export Share Requirements in China

A subsidy is subject to an export share requirement (ESR) when firms must export more than a certain share of their output to receive it. Such incentives are frequently found in free trade zones, export processing regimes and measures targeted at foreign investors, both in China and other developing countries. In this paper we provide the first quantitative assessment of the effect that using subsidies with ESR has on exports, the intensity of competition and welfare, both in the enacting country and its trading partners, using a two-country model of trade with heterogeneous firms. We find that the subsidy with ESR boosts exports more than an equivalent unconditional subsidy available to all exporters. Crucially, the subsidy with ESR provides greater protection to low-profitability firms, while the unconditional subsidy does the opposite. The combination of export promotion and lower intensity of domestic competition generated by the subsidy with ESR can be described as “protectionism through exporting.” The imposition of an ESR, however, greatly exacerbates the welfare loss associated with subsidizing exporters

The political economyof trade policy: Gone for good? Subsidies with export share requirements in China: 2002-13

This paper presents a simple model of subsidies with export share requirements (ESR) in a heterogeneous firm environment. A two-country general equilibrium version of the model with a single 100% ESR is calibrated using firm-level data from the 2002 wave of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey collected by the World Bank for China. The calibrated model is used to gauge the change in subsidies with ESR that is consistent with the fall in the share of 'pure exporters', firms exporting all their output, observed in China, from 25.7% in 2002 to 11.1% in 2013. Our results indicate that a 6.9% reduction in the ad-valorem subsidy rate available to firms that export all their output is consistent with the observed fall in their share of exporting firms. Expenditure in subsidies (as a share of value-added) falls by 66% and welfare in China increases by 1.76% while real income in the rest of the world falls by 0.59%

Twin Peaks

Received wisdom suggests that most exporters sell the majority of their output domestically. In this paper, however, we show that the distribution of export intensity not only varies substantially across countries, but in a large number of cases is also bimodal, displaying what we refer to as twin peaks. We reconcile this new stylized fact with an otherwise standard, two-country model of trade in which firms are heterogeneous in terms of the demand they face in each market. We show that when firm-destination-specific revenue shifters are distributed lognormal, gamma, or Frechet with sufficiently high dispersion, the distribution of export intensity has two modes in the boundaries of the support and their height is determined by a country's size relative to the rest of the world. We estimate the deep parameters characterizing the distribution of export intensity. Our results show that when the conditions for the existence of twin peaks are met, differences in relative market size can explain most of the observed variation in the distribution of export intensity across the world