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Working Paper
Geographic barriers to commodity price integration: evidence from US cities and Swedish towns, 1732-1860
We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion for 14 commodities from 1732 to 1860. The prices are reported for US cities and Swedish market towns, so we can compare international and intranational dispersion. Distance and commodity-specific fixed effects explain a large share - roughly 60% - of the variability in a panel of more than 230,000 relative prices over these 128 years. There was a negative "ocean effect": international dispersion was less than would be predicted using distance, narrowing the effective ocean by more than 3000 km. Price ...
Working Paper
Gains from Offshoring? Evidence from U.S. Microdata
We construct a new linked data set with over one thousand offshoring events by matching Trade Adjustment Assistance program petition data to confidential data on U.S. firm operations. We exploit these data to assess how offshoring affects domestic firm-level aggregate employment, output, wages and productivity. Consistent with heterogenous firm models where offshoring involves a fixed cost, we find that the average offshoring firm is larger and more productive than the average non-offshorer. After initiating offshoring, firms experience large declines in employment (46.2 per cent), output ...
Working Paper
The Double-Edged Sword of Global Integration: Robustness, Fragility & Contagion in the International Firm Network
We estimate global inter-firm networks across all major industries from 1981 through 2016 and provide the first empirical tests for both robust (beneficial) and fragile (harmful) network behavior, relating firms' health with global integration. More connected firms are less likely to be in distress and have higher profit growth and equity returns, but are also more exposed to direct contagion from distressed neighboring firms and network level crises. Our analysis reveals the centrality of finance in the international firm network and increased globalization, with greater potential for crises ...
Working Paper
Capital Flows, Asset Prices, and the Real Economy: A "China Shock" in the U.S. Real Estate Market
We study the effects of foreign real estate capital flows on local asset prices and employment using detailed housing transactions data. We document (i) a "China shock" in the U.S. real estate market after 2007 driven by the Chinese government's house purchase restrictions and (ii) "home bias" in foreign Chinese housing purchases in the United States as they are concentrated in ZIP codes historically populated by ethnic Chinese. Exploiting the quasi-random temporal and spatial variation of real estate capital inflows from China, we find that foreign Chinese housing purchases have a positive ...