Export or merge? Proximity vs. concentration in product space

This paper proposes a proximity-concentration tradeoff in product space as a determinant of horizontal foreign direct investment (FDI). Firms that enter a foreign market by exporting are able to capture consumer surplus from introducing a differentiated product with characteristics that the incumbent cannot match. In relatively globalized product space, in contrast, consumers perceive an entrant’s difference to existing products as less pronounced, so a consumer’s virtual distance costs in product space are lower and a merger with an incumbent (horizontal FDI) offers pricing power that allows the entrant to extract consumer rent. Lower physical trade costs of shipping make Bertrand price competition fiercer in differentiated product space and can provide an additional incentive for a merger. A basic product space model with a linear Hotelling setup can therefore explain why FDI has become more frequent in recent periods in the presence of falling trade costs. Cross-border merger and acquisitions data support the model’s prediction that horizontal FDI grows relatively faster than exports in differentiated goods industries, compared to homogeneous-goods industries

Rational Information Choice in Financial Market Equilibrium

Adding a stage of signal acquisition to the expected utility model shows that Bayesian updating results in a well defined law of demand for financial information when asset return distributions are conjugate priors to signals such as in the gamma-Poisson case. Signals have a positive marginal utility value that falls in their number if and only if investors are risk averse, asset markets large, and variance-mean ratios of asset returns high in fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium. Expected asset price increases in the number of signals so that expected excess return drops. The diminishing excess return prevents Bayesian investors from unbounded information demand even if signals are costless, unless the riskfree asset is removed. Signals mutually benefit homogeneous investors because revealing asset price permits updating so that a Pareto criterion judges competitive equilibrium as not sufficiently informative. However, asset price responses make incentives for signal acquisition dependent on portfolios so that welfare and distributional consequences become intricately linked when investors are heterogeneous.

The Existence of Informationally Efficient Markets When Individuals Are Rational

A rational-expectations equilibrium with positive demand for financial information does exist under fully revealing asset price - contrary to a wide-held conjecture. Generalizing the common additive signal-return model with CARA utility to the family of distributions with moment generating functions, this paper shows that individual investors endowed with an average portfolio demand information in equilibrium if they can adjust portfolio size. More information diminishes the expected excess return of a risky asset so that investors who only have a choice of portfolio composition or whose asset endowments strongly differ from the average portfolio are worse off. Under fully revealing price, information market equilibria both with and without information acquisition are Pareto efficient.information, efficiency, financial markets, portfolio theory

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

Trade, Technology, and Productivity: A Study of Brazilian Manufacturers, 1986-1998

Brazil's trade liberalization between 1990 and 1993, and its partial reversal in 1995, are used to study how reduced inward trade barriers affect productivity. The production function of Brazilian manufacturers is estimated at the ISIC3 two-digit level under various alternatives, including an extension of Olley and Pakes' (1996) procedure. Firm-level productivity is inferred and then related to trade. Findings suggest that (1) foreign competition pressures firms to raise productivity markedly, whereas (2) the use of foreign inputs plays a minor role for productivity change. (3) The shutdown probability of inefficient firms rises with competition from abroad, thus contributing positively to aggregate productivity. Counterfactual simulations indicate that the competitive push (1) is an important source of immediate productivity change, while the elimination of inefficient firms (3) unfolds its impact slowly.

Margins of Multinational Labor Substitution

Multinational labor demand responds to wage differentials at the extensive margin, when a multinational enterprise (MNE) expands into foreign locations, and at the intensive margin, when an MNE operates existing affiliates across locations. We derive conditions for parametric and nonparametric identification of an MNE model to infer elasticities of labor substitution at both margins, controlling for location selectivity. Prior studies have rarely found foreign wages or operations to affect employment. Our strategy detects salient adjustments at the extensive margin for German MNEs. With every percentage increase in German wages, German MNEs allocate 2,000 manufacturing jobs to Eastern Europe at the extensive margin and 4,000 jobs overall.multinational enterprise, location choice, sample selectivity, labor demand, translog cost function, nonparametric estimation

The effect of FDI on job separation

A novel linked employer-employee data set documents that expanding multinational enterprises retain more domestic jobs than competitors without foreign expansions. In contrast to prior research, a propensity score estimator allows enterprise performance to vary with foreign direct investment (FDI) and shows that the foreign expansion itself is the dominant explanatory factor for reduced worker separation rates. Bounding, concomitant variable tests, and robustness checks rule out competing hypotheses. The finding is consistent with the idea that, given global factor price differences, a prevention of enterprises from outward FDI would lead to more domestic worker separations. FDI raises domestic-worker retention more pronouncedly among highly educated workers and for expansions into distant locations. --Multinational enterprises,international investment,demand for labor,worker layoffs,linked employer-employee data

Trade and Workforce Changeover in Brazil

Linked employer-employee data for Brazil over a period of large-scale trade liberalization document two salient workforce changeovers. Within the traded-goods sector, there is a marked occupation downgrading and a simultaneous education upgrading by which employers fill expanding low-skill intensive occupations with increasingly educated jobholders. Between sectors, there is a labor demand shift towards the least and the most skilled, which can be traced back to relatively weaker declines of traded-goods industries that intensely use low-skilled labor and to relatively stronger expansions of nontraded-output industries that intensely use high-skilled labor. Whereas these observations are broadly consistent with predictions of Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory for a low-skill abundant economy, classic trade theory is a less useful guide to the observed reallocation pattern. Establishment-level regressions show that exporters exhibit significant employment downsizing. Workforce changeovers are neither achieved through worker reassignments to new tasks within employers nor are they brought about by reallocations across employers and traded-goods industries. Instead, trade-exposed industries shrink their workforces by dismissing less-schooled workers more frequently than more-schooled workers especially in skill-intensive occupations, while most displaced workers shift to nontraded-output industries or out of recorded employment. It remains an important task for research to analyze the impact of economic reform on worker separations, accessions and spell durations outside employment at the individual worker level.

Estimating Production Functions When Productivity Change is Endogenous

Production function estimation with micro-data shows that a persistent unobserved variable varies within firm or plant over time but resists treatment and may cause biases. This paper presents an estimation model of the firm under endogenous productivity change. The model implies that (i) the so-far untreated effect stems from firms' planned efficiency responses to the competitive environment and that (ii) a suit-able proxy to productivity is investment interacted with a sector-level competition variable. An application to Brazilian manufacturing firm data shows that this proxy and multivariate extensions yield coefficient estimates with considerably less noise in bootstraps than alternative proxies, while reducing the difference to fixed-effects estimation and remedying commonly suspected biases. Whereas productivity change is measured consistently, scale economies are not identified when productivity and price are endogenous.

Offshoring and the onshore composition of tasks and skills

We analyze the relationship between offshoring and the onshore workforce composition in German multinational enterprises (MNEs), using plant data that allow us to discern tasks, occupations, and workforce skills. Offshoring is associated with a statistically significant shift towards more non-routine and more interactive tasks, and with a shift towards highly educated workers. The shift towards highly educated workers is in excess of what is implied by changes in either the task or the occupational composition. Offshoring to low-income countries—with the exception of Central and Eastern European countries—is associated with stronger onshore responses. We find offshoring to predict between 10 and 15 percent of observed changes in wage-bill shares of highly educated workers and measures of non-routine and interactive tasks