Product Differentiation, Multi-product Firms and Estimating the Impact of Trade Liberalization on Productivity PDF Download

Author: Jan de Loecker
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Free trade
Languages : en
Pages : 46

View

Book Description
"In this paper I analyze the productivity gains from trade liberalization in the Belgian textile industry. So far, empirical research has established a strong relationship between opening up to trade and productivity, relying almost entirely on deflated sales to proxy for output in the production function. The latter implies that the resulting productivity estimates still capture price and demand shocks which are most likely to be correlated with the change in the operating environment, which invalidate the evaluation of the welfare implications. In order to get at the true productivity gains I propose a simple methodology to estimate a production function controlling for unobserved prices by introducing an explicit demand system. I combine a unique data set containing matched plant-level and product-level information with detailed product-level quota protection information to recover estimates for productivity as well as parameters of the demand side (markups). I find that when correcting for unobserved prices and demand shocks, the estimated productivity gains from relaxing protection are only half (from 6 to only 3 percent) of those obtained with standard techniques."--abstract.

Author: Andrew B. Bernard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Free trade
Languages : en
Pages : 66

View

Book Description
This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level "ability" and firm-product-level "expertise", both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the firm's payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher firm-level ability raises a firm's productivity across all products, which induces a positive correlation between a firm's intensive (output per product) and extensive (number of products) margins. Trade liberalization fosters productivity growth within and across firms and in aggregate by inducing firms to shed marginally productive products and forcing the lowest-productivity firms to exit. Though exporters produce a smaller range of products after liberalization, they increase the share of products sold abroad as well as exports per product. All of these adjustments are shown to be relatively more pronounced in countries' comparative advantage industries.

Author: Timothy Dunne
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226172570
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 623

View

Book Description
The Census Bureau has recently begun releasing official statistics that measure the movements of firms in and out of business and workers in and out of jobs. The economic analyses in Producer Dynamics exploit this newly available data on establishments, firms, and workers, to address issues in industrial organization, labor, growth, macroeconomics, and international trade. This innovative volume brings together a group of renowned economists to probe topics such as firm dynamics across countries; patterns of employment dynamics; firm dynamics in nonmanufacturing industries such as retail, health services, and agriculture; employer-employee turnover from matched worker/firm data sets; and turnover in international markets. Producer Dynamics will serve as an invaluable reference to economists and policy makers seeking to understand the links between firms and workers, and the sources of economic dynamics, in the age of globalization.

Author: Jangho Choi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Exports
Languages : en
Pages : 80

View

Book Description
The objective of this dissertation is to examine multi-product firms' productivity and export behavior. More specifically, this dissertation estimates productivity of firms that produce and sell multiple products, and the role of productivity in such firms' export behavior. In doing so, this dissertation develops a firm-level gravity approach to test whether multi-product firms self select to export or learn from exporting. In the first of part of this dissertation, I examine whether intra-firm resource reallocation of a multi-product firm affects its Total Factor Productivity (TFP). By extending earlier approaches, I estimate unbiased and consistent TFP of multi-product firms using a revenue-based production function. I find that TFP is more likely to be overestimated when multi-product firms' internalized demand linkage is not taken into account. I also find that multi-product firms' TFP decreases as it expands the number of products produced, but specialization of production does not play a role in TFP. In the second part, I present a theoretical framework to derive a firm-level gravity equation. By equating the total demand and total production of multi-product firms, I derive a firm-level gravity equation where export flows from firms to consumers is proportional to the product of economic size of firms, consuming power of a representative consumer, and trade resistance between origin and destination. Using the firm-level gravity equation, I test the hypothesis that high productivity firms self select to export and that the size of export flows is determined by productivity. I find that the economic size of exporting firms and the consuming power of a representative consumer have a positive and statistically significant effect on exports, while trade resistance such as tariff and distance have the opposite effect. I also find that the estimated coefficients of the firm-level gravity equation tend to be smaller than those of the traditional country-level gravity equation. In the final part of the dissertation, I test whether or not previous export experience improves the productivity of firms. Again, the estimable equation is derived from the equilibrium condition presented in the second part. My result confirms that previous export experience indeed improves productivity of exporting firms, but tariffs have the opposite effect. The results of this dissertation reveal the economic behavior of multi-product firms, which usually account for a large of economic activity and output in many countries. Understanding such firms' productivity and export behavior can offer strategies for economic growth and development. Empirical findings of this dissertation suggest policy options including lowering tariffs, and improving infrastructure that can lower transportation costs. Further examination of product range and specialization of production can offer strategies to source exports from small and midsize firms.

Author: Francesco Manaresi
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1498315917
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 75

View

Book Description
We study the impact of bank credit on firm productivity. We exploit a matched firm-bank database covering all the credit relationships of Italian corporations, together with a natural experiment, to measure idiosyncratic supply-side shocks to credit availability and to estimate a production model augmented with financial frictions. We find that a contraction in credit supply causes a reduction of firm TFP growth and also harms IT-adoption, innovation, exporting, and adoption of superior management practices, while a credit expansion has limited impact. Quantitatively, the credit contraction between 2007 and 2009 accounts for about a quarter of observed the decline in TFP.

Author: John Beath
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521335522
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220

View

Book Description
There are few industries in modern market economies that do not manufacture differentiated products. This book provides a systematic explanation and analysis of the widespread prevalence of this important category of products. The authors concentrate on models in which product selection is endogenous. In the first four chapters they consider models that try to predict the level of product differentiation that would emerge in situations of market equilibrium. These market equilibria with differentiated products are characterised and then compared with social welfare optima. Particular attention is paid to the distinction between horizontal and vertical differentiation as well as to the related issues of product quality and durability. This book brings together the most important theoretical contributions to these topics in a succinct and coherent manner. One of its major strengths is the way in which it carefully sets out the basic intuition behind the formal results. It will be useful to advanced undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in industrial economics and microeconomic theory.

Author: Ana Fernandes
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484386175
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 66

View

Book Description
The Melitz model highlights the importance of the extensive margin (the number of firms exporting) for trade flows. Using the World Bank’s Exporter Dynamics Database (EDD) featuring firm-level exports from 50 countries, we find that around 50 percent of variation in exports is along the extensive margin—a quantitative victory for the Melitz framework. The remaining 50 percent on the intensive margin (exports per exporting firm) contradicts a special case of Melitz with Pareto-distributed firm productivity, which has become a tractable benchmark. This benchmark model predicts that, conditional on the fixed costs of exporting, all variation in exports across trading partners should occur on the extensive margin. We find that moving from a Pareto to a lognormal distribution allows the Melitz model to match the role of the intensive margin in the EDD. We use likelihood methods and the EDD to estimate a generalized Melitz model with a joint lognormal distribution for firm-level productivity, fixed costs and demand shifters, and use “exact hat algebra” to quantify the effects of a decline in trade costs on trade flows and welfare in the estimated model. The welfare effects turn out to be quite close to those in the standard Melitz-Pareto model when we choose the Pareto shape parameter to fit the average trade elasticity implied by our estimated Melitz-lognormal model, although there are significant differences regarding the effects on trade flows.

Author: Rui Xu
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1484326008
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 44

View

Book Description
We analyze the impact of rising import competition from China on U.S. innovative activities. Using Compustat data, we find that import competition induces R&D expenditures to be reallocated towards more productive and more profitable firms within each industry. Such reallocation effect has the potential to offset the average drop in firm-level R&D identified in the previous literature. Indeed, our quantitative analysis shows no adverse impact of import competition on aggregate R&D expenditures. Taking the analysis beyond manufacturing, we find that import competition has led to reallocation of researchers towards booming service industries, including business and repairs, personal services, and financial services.

Author: Larry D. Qiu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 53

View

Book Description
This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of one-sided tariff cuts on firms' export product scope. The theoretical model explicitly incorporates cost of management in addition to the commonly used production cost. Firms are heterogeneous in terms of managerial efficiency but homogenous in terms of production productivity. The analysis predicts that the home country's tariff cut reduces all home firms' export product scope, whereas in response to the foreign country's tariff cut, a home firm's export product scope expands (shrinks) if the firm's management cost is low (high). These predictions are supported by our empirical analysis based on data on Chinese firms from 2000 to 2006.

Author: Kate Ho
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0323988873
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 782

View

Book Description
Handbook of Industrial Organization Volume 4 highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters. Each chapter is written by an international board of authors. Part of the renowned Handbooks in Economics series Chapters are contributed by some of the leading experts in their fields A source, reference and teaching supplement for industrial organizations or industrial economists