Search Results
Discussion Paper
Global Supply Chains and U.S. Import Price Inflation
Inflation around the world increased dramatically with the reopening of economies following COVID-19. After reaching a peak of 11 percent in the second quarter of 2021, world trade prices dropped by more than five percentage points by the middle of 2023. U.S. import prices followed a similar pattern, albeit with a lower peak and a deeper trough. In a new study, we investigate what drove these price movements by using information on the prices charged for products shipped from fifty-two exporters to fifty-two importers, comprising more than twenty-five million trade flows. We uncover several ...
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.
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 ...
Report
How did China’s WTO entry benefit U.S. prices?
We analyze the effects of China?s rapid export expansion following World Trade Organization (WTO) entry on U.S. prices, exploiting cross-industry variation in trade liberalization. Lower input tariffs boosted Chinese firms? productivity, lowered costs, and, in conjunction with reduced U.S. tariff uncertainty, expanded export participation. We find that China?s WTO entry significantly reduced variety-adjusted U.S. manufacturing price indexes between 2000 and 2006. For the Chinese components of these indexes, one-third of the beneficial impact comes from Chinese exporters lowering their prices, ...
Discussion Paper
Does Import Competition Improve the Quality of Domestic Goods?
Firms must produce high-quality goods to be competitive in international markets, but how do they transition from producing low- to high-quality goods? In a new study (?Import Competition and Quality Upgrading,? forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics), we focus on how tougher import competition affects firms? decisions to upgrade the quality of their goods. Our results, which we summarize in this post, show that stiffer import competition affects quality-upgrading decisions. For firms already producing very high-quality goods, lower tariffs induce them to produce goods of even ...
Discussion Paper
The Exchange Rate Disconnect
Why do large movements in exchange rates have small effects on international goods prices? This empirical regularity is a central puzzle in international macroeconomics. In a new study, we show that the key to understanding this exchange rate disconnect is to take into account that the largest exporters are also the largest importers. This is important because when exporters import their intermediate inputs, they face offsetting exchange rate effects on their marginal costs. For example, a depreciation of the euro relative to the U.S. dollar makes exports in U.S. dollars cheaper?but it also ...
Discussion Paper
Using Stock Returns to Assess the Aggregate Effect of the U.S.‑China Trade War
During 2018-19, the U.S. levied import tariffs of 10 to 50 percent on more than $300 billion of imports from China, and in response China retaliated with high tariffs of its own on U.S. exports. Estimating the aggregate impact of the trade war on the U.S. economy is challenging because tariffs can affect the economy through many different channels. In addition to changing relative prices, tariffs can impact productivity and economic uncertainty. Moreover, these effects can take years to become apparent in the data, and it is difficult to know what the future implications of a tariff are ...
Report
Importers, exporters, and exchange rate disconnect
Large exporters are simultaneously large importers. In this paper, we show that this pattern is key to understanding low aggregate exchange rate pass-through as well as the variation in pass-through across exporters. First, we develop a theoretical framework that combines variable markups due to strategic complementarities and endogenous choice to import intermediate inputs. The model predicts that firms with high import shares and high market shares have low exchange rate pass-through. Second, we test and quantify the theoretical mechanisms using Belgian firm-product-level data with ...
Report
Supply- and demand-side factors in global banking
What is the role of supply and demand forces in determining movements in international banking flows? Answering this question is crucial for understanding the international transmission of financial shocks and formulating policy. This paper addresses the question by using the method developed in Amiti and Weinstein (forthcoming) to exactly decompose the growth in international bank credit into common shocks, idiosyncratic supply shocks, and idiosyncratic demand shocks for the 2000-16 period. A striking feature of the global banking flows data can be characterized by what we term the ?Anna ...
Discussion Paper
New China Tariffs Increase Costs to U.S. Households
Tariffs on $200 billion of U.S. imports from China subject to earlier 10 percent levies increased to 25 percent beginning May 10, 2019, after a breakdown in trade negotiations. In this post, we consider the cost of these higher tariffs to the typical U.S. household.