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Working Paper
Learning and the Value of Trade Relationships
This paper quantifies the value of importer-exporter relationships. We show that almost 80 percent of U.S. imports take place in pre-existing relationships, with sizable heterogeneity across countries, and show that traded quantities and survival increase as relationships age. We develop a two-country general equilibrium trade model with learning that is consistent with these facts. A model-based measure of relationship value explains survival during the 2008-09 crisis. Knowledge accumulated within long-term relationships is quantitatively important: wiping out all memory from previous ...
Working Paper
Identifying Foreign Suppliers in U.S. Import Data
Relationships between firms and their foreign suppliers are the foundation of international trade, but data limitations and reliability concerns make studying such relationships challenging. We evaluate and enhance supplier information in U.S. import data and present new facts about importer?exporter relationships. Count of foreign exporters from U.S. import data tends to exceed those from source country data, especially from China. The pattern of U.S. imports from origin countries changes substantially by tracing trade back to the supplier's location instead. Related-party relationships ...
Working Paper
\"It's Not You, It's Me\" : Breakups in U.S.-China Trade Relationships
Costs to switching suppliers can affect prices by discouraging buyer movements from high to low cost sellers. This paper uses confidential U.S. Customs data on U.S. importers and their Chinese exporters to investigate these costs. I find considerable barriers to supply chain adjustments: 45% of arm?s-length importers keep their partner, and one-third of switching importers remain in the same city. Guided by these regularities, I propose and structurally estimate a dynamic discrete exporter choice model. Cost estimates are large and heterogeneous across products. These costs matter for trade ...
Working Paper
Structural Change and Global Trade
Services, which are less traded than goods, rose from 58 percent of world expenditure in 1970 to 79 percent in 2015. Using a Ricardian trade model incorporating endogenous structural change, we quantify how this substantial shift in consumption has affected trade. Without structural change, we find that the world trade to GDP ratio would be 15 percentage points higher by 2015, about half the boost delivered from declining trade costs. In addition, this structural change has lowered the global welfare gains from trade integration by almost 40 percent over the past four decades. Absent further ...
Working Paper
Who's Most Exposed to International Shocks? Estimating Differences in Import Price Sensitivity across U.S. Demographic Groups
Differences in consumption patterns across demographic groups mean that international price shocks differentially affect such groups. We construct import price indexes for U.S. consumer groups that vary by age, race, sex, education, and urban status. Black consumers and college graduates experienced significantly higher import price inflation from 1996-2018 compared to other groups, such as high school dropouts, rural consumers, and consumers over 60. Sensitivity to international price shocks varies widely, implying movements in exchange rates and foreign prices, both during our sample and ...
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
Who's Most Exposed to International Shocks? Estimating Differences in Import Price Sensitivity across U.S. Demographic Groups
Differences in consumption patterns across demographic groups mean that international price shocks differentially affect such groups. We construct import price indexes for U.S. consumer groups that vary by age, race, sex, education, and urban status. Black consumers and college graduates experienced significantly higher import price inflation from 1996-2018 compared to other groups, such as high school dropouts, rural consumers, and consumers over 60. Sensitivity to international price shocks varies widely, implying movements in exchange rates and foreign prices, both during our sample and ...
Newsletter
The increasing importance of services expenditures and the dampening effect on global trade
Globalization, particularly through international trade in goods, has helped to foster the creation of tremendous amounts of wealth and prosperity across much of the globe while lifting sizable portions of the world’s population out of poverty. In particular, the latter half of the twentieth century delivered unprecedented rates of increased economic integration among many countries. Access to global markets supported the industrialization of emerging economies and opened up new markets for firms in wealthier countries. As a result of the expansion of international trade and competition, ...
Discussion Paper
Distributional Consequences of Trade for U.S. Consumers: Estimating Group-Specific Import Price Inflation
This note highlights the results of our project constructing import price indexes across different U.S. income deciles over the years 1998 to 2014.
Working Paper
Structural Change and Global Trade
Services, which are less traded than goods, rose from 50 percent of world expenditure in 1970 to 80 percent in 2015. Such structural change restrained "openness"?the ratio of world trade to world GDP?over this period. We quantify this with a general equilibrium trade model featuring non-homothetic preferences and input-output linkages. Openness would have been 70 percent in 2015, 23 percentage points higher than the data, if expenditure patterns were unchanged from 1970. Structural change is critical for estimating the dynamics of trade barriers and welfare gains from trade. Ongoing ...