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Report
U.S. Market Concentration and Import Competition
A rapidly growing literature has shown that market concentration among domestic firms has increased in the United States over the last three decades. Using confidential census data for the manufacturing sector, we show that typical measures of concentration, once adjusted for sales by foreign exporters, actually stayed constant between 1992 and 2012. We reconcile these findings by linking part of the increase in domestic concentration to import competition. Although concentration among U.S.-based firms rose, the growth of foreign firms, mostly at the bottom of the sales distribution, ...
Working Paper
Why Do Firms Pay Different Interest Rates on Their Bank Loans?
We document significant variation in interest rates among similar commercial and industrial loans using confidential supervisory data on the largest US banks. This dispersion does not appear to be due to risk. We rationalize the data using a search cost model and find that search costs are highest for smaller and riskier borrowers and lower for public firms, consistent with predictable differences in the costs of screening and monitoring. We find that search costs are substantial. Over a third of firms behave as if they do not comparison shop; half of all firms appear to only obtain two ...
Discussion Paper
Did the West Coast Port Dispute Contribute to the First-Quarter GDP Slowdown?
The decline in U.S. GDP of 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2015 was much larger than market analysts expected, with net exports subtracting a staggering 1.9 percentage points (seasonally adjusted annualized rate). A range of factors is being discussed in policy circles to try to understand what contributed to this decline. Factors such as the strong U.S. dollar and weak foreign demand are usually incorporated in forecasters' models. However, the effects of unusual events such as extremely cold weather and labor disputes are more difficult to quantify in standard models. In this post, we ...
Journal Article
Is the United States losing its productivity advantage?
Strikingly high rates of labor productivity growth in China, India, and other emerging economies have prompted concerns that U.S. workers and firms are losing ground to their competitors in world markets. A closer look at the evidence, however, suggests that rapid foreign productivity growth will bring gains as well as losses to the U.S. economy. Some import-competing firms may be compelled to restructure or leave the market, but consumers will benefit from lower import prices and more import varieties, and U.S. exporters may gain access to cheaper intermediate products from abroad.
Discussion Paper
The Effect of the Strong Dollar on U.S. Growth
The recent strengthening of the U.S. dollar has raised concerns about its impact on U.S. GDP growth. The U.S. dollar has appreciated around 12 percent since mid-2014, rising against almost all of our trading partners, with the largest gains against Japan, Mexico, Canada, and the euro area. There was far less movement against newly industrial Asian economies and hardly any change against China. In this blog, we ask how the strength of the dollar affects U.S. GDP growth. Although the dollar can impact the U.S. growth through a number of different channels, we focus on the direct impact through ...
Discussion Paper
Will the United States Benefit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership?
U.S. involvement in what could be one of the world?s largest free trade agreements, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), has garnered a lot of attention, especially since the entry of Japan into negotiations last year. The proposed free trade agreement (FTA) encompasses twelve countries, which combined account for 45 percent of U.S. exports and 37 percent of U.S. imports. This broad coverage of U.S. trade seems to suggest large potential gains for the U.S. from the agreement. However, three quarters of this trade is already within the U.S. free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico (the ...
Discussion Paper
China’s Impact on U.S. Inflation
U.S. import prices of consumer goods shipped from China have been moderating in recent quarters, following an upward surge of 11 percent between mid-2010 and the end of 2011. These price changes have far-reaching consequences for U.S. businesses and consumers, because China is the largest single supplier of imports to the United States, accounting for more than 20 percent of nonoil imports and more than 30 percent of consumer goods. In this post, we track U.S. import price movements in different product categories from China by constructing import price indexes that use highly disaggregated ...
Report
How much do bank shocks affect investment? Evidence from matched bank-firm loan data
We show that supply-side financial shocks have a large impact on firms' investment. We do this by developing a new methodology to separate firm-borrowing shocks from bank supply shocks using a vast sample of matched bank-firm lending data. We decompose loan movements in Japan for the period 1990 to 2010 into bank, firm, industry, and common shocks. The high degree of financial institution concentration means that individual banks are large relative to the size of the economy, which creates a role for granular shocks as in Gabaix (2011). As a result, bank supply shocks?that is, movements in ...
Discussion Paper
The Impact of Import Tariffs on U.S. Domestic Prices
The United States imposed new import tariffs on about $283 billion of U.S. imports in 2018, with rates ranging between 10 percent and 50 percent. In this post, we estimate the effect of these tariffs on the prices paid by U.S. producers and consumers. We find that the higher import tariffs had immediate impacts on U.S. domestic prices. Our results suggest that the aggregate consumer price index (CPI) is 0.3 percent higher than it would have been without the tariffs.
Discussion Paper
Has Market Power of U.S. Firms Increased?
A number of studies have documented that market concentration among U.S. firms has increased over the last decades, as large firms have grown more dominant. In a new study, we examine whether this rising domestic concentration means that large U.S. firms have more market power in the manufacturing sector. Our research argues that increasing foreign competition over the last few decades has in fact reduced U.S. firms’ market power in manufacturing.