Publications

We develop a model of export-platform foreign direct investment (FDI) in which final goods are produced only with labor and there are no fixed costs of exporting. We derive a simple condition that determines whether an MNE's plants are substitutes or complements. This condition is shaped by the relative size of (i) the cross-firm elasticity of demand the MNE faces for its goods and (ii) the within-firm elasticity of labor substitution across the MNE's plants. In two extensions of the model, we show that this complementarity is enhanced by firm-level (rather than plant-level) fixed costs of exporting and of sourcing inputs.

Multinational firms (MNEs) dominate trade flows, yet their global production decisions are often ignored in firm-level studies of exporting and importing. Using newly merged data on US firms' trade and multinational activity by country, we show that MNEs are more likely to trade not only with countries in which they have affiliates, but also with other countries within their affiliates' region. We rationalize these patterns with a new source of firm-level scale economies that arises when country-specific fixed costs to source from, or sell in, a market are shared across all the MNE's plants. These shared fixed costs create interdependencies between a firm's production and trade locations that generate third-market responses to bilateral trade policy changes.

Import tariffs tend to be higher on final goods than inputs, a phenomenon referred to as tariff escalation. Despite its salience, existing research does not predict that tariff escalation increases welfare. We show that tariff escalation is usually welfare-improving when final-good production occurs under increasing returns to scale. In our vertical model, countries export inputs directly or by embodying them in final goods. The latter raises welfare if final-good efficiency is increasing in sector size, and a disproportionately high final-good tariff exploits this benefit. When tariffs are the only available instruments, this effect dominates input-tariff motives for most parameter values.

We develop a model of endogenous production networks with fixed costs in the formation of links between firms. We show that the closed economy equilibrium is unique if the set of feasible networks consists only of networks that are acyclic and the buyer initiates the link formation while having full bargaining power in price negotiations with the supplier. We provide examples of multiple equilibria if the supplier initiates the link formation in both cyclic and acyclic feasible networks or if the buyer initiates the link formation in a cyclic production network. We take the acyclic production network model to Belgian data on firm-to-firm production networks and show that it matches well the salient features of the network. The model generates substantial churn in domestic firm-to-firm linkages in response to trade shocks, while delivering only moderately different welfare changes compared to a model with fixed linkages.

We use Belgian data on domestic firm-to-firm transactions and ask how the measurement of the share of imports in final consumption is affected when one uses data recorded at higher levels of aggregation. We find that aggregating detailed firm-to-firm transaction data to the firm level and imposing homogeneity assumptions in the composition of firms’ input and output do not substantially affect the measurement of the share of imports in final consumption. However, using the national IO tables alone may understate the share of imports in final consumption and, thereby, the gains from trade.

Governments go to great lengths to attract foreign multinationals because they are thought to raise the wages paid to their employees (direct effects) and to improve outcomes at local domestic firms (indirect effects). We construct the first U.S. employer-employee dataset with foreign ownership information from tax records to measure these direct and indirect effects. We find the average direct effect of a foreign multinational firm on its U.S. workers is a 7 percent increase in wages. This premium is larger for higher skilled workers and for the employees of firms from high GDP per capita countries. We find evidence that it is membership in a multinational production network—instead of foreignness—that generates the foreign firm premium. We leverage the past spatial clustering of foreign-owned firms by country of ownership to identify the indirect effects. An expansion in the foreign multinational share of commuting zone employment substantially increases the employment, value added, and—for higher earning workers—wages at local domestic-owned firms. Per job created by a foreign multinational, our estimates suggest annual gains of 13,400 USD to the aggregate wages of local incumbents, two-thirds of which are from indirect effects. Our estimates suggest that—via mega-deals for subsidies from local governments—foreign multinationals are able to extract a sizable fraction of the local surplus they generate.

We examine how many and what kind of firms ultimately rely on foreign inputs, sell to foreign markets, and are affected by trade shocks. To capture that firms can trade indirectly by buying from or selling to domestic firms that import or export, we use Belgian data with information on both domestic firm-to-firm sales and foreign trade transactions. We find that most firms use a lot of foreign inputs, but only a small number of firms show that dependence through direct imports. While direct exporters are rare, a majority of firms are indirectly exporting. In most firms, however, indirect export is quantitatively modest, and sales at home are the key source of revenue. We show that what matters for the transmission of foreign demand shocks to a firm’s revenue is how much the firm ultimately sells to foreign markets, not whether these sales are from direct or indirect export. 

This paper studies the life-cycle dynamics of exporters and multinational enterprises (MNEs). Using rich firm-level data, we document a comprehensive set of facts on entry, exit, and growth of new exporters and new MNEs. Guided by these facts, we build a model based on the standard proximity-concentration trade-off extended to incorporate time-varying firm productivity and sunk costs of MNE entry. The calibrated version of the model goes far in matching cross-sectional and dynamic moments of the data on exporters and MNEs. Our results point to much higher sunk costs for MNE than for export activities. Finally, we show how including the choice to become an MNE affects the predicted export dynamics after a trade liberalization episode. 

We estimate the price effect of U.S. import restrictions on washers. The 2012 and 2016 antidumping duties against South Korea and China were accompanied by downward or minor price movements along with production relocation to other export platform countries. With the 2018 tariffs, on nearly all source countries, the price of washers increased nearly 12 percent. Interestingly, the price of dryers—not subject to tariffs—increased by an equivalent amount. Factoring in dryer prices and price increases by domestic brands, the 2018 tariffs on washers imply a tariff elasticity of consumer prices of above one. 

In the automobile industry, as in many tradable goods markets, firms usually earn their highest market share within their domestic market. The goal of this paper is to disentangle the supply- and demand-driven sources of the home market advantage. While trade costs, foreign production costs, and taste heterogeneity all matter for market outcomes, we find that a preference for home brands is the single most important driver of home market advantage - even after controlling for brand histories and dealer networks. Furthermore, we also find that consumers favor domestically producing brands even if these brands originated from a foreign country. Therefore, our results suggest a novel demand effect of FDI: Establishing local production increases demand for the brand even in the absence of any cost savings.

We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. In contrast to canonical export models where firm profits are additively separable across destination markets, global sourcing decisions naturally interact through the firm’s cost function. We show that, under an empirically relevant condition, selection into importing exhibits complementarities across source markets. We exploit these complementarities to solve the firm’s problem and estimate the model. Comparing counterfactual predictions to reduced-form evidence highlights the importance of interdependencies in firms’ sourcing decisions across markets, which generate heterogeneous domestic sourcing responses to trade shocks.

Most international commerce is carried out by multinational firms, which use their foreign affiliates both to serve the market of the host country and to export to other markets outside the host country. In this paper, I examine the determinants of multinational firms’ location and production decisions and the welfare implications of multinational production. The few existing quantitative general equilibrium models that incorporate multinational firms achieve tractability by assuming away export platforms – i.e. they do not allow foreign affiliates of multinationals to export – or by ignoring fixed costs associated with foreign investment. I develop a quantifiable multi-country general equilibrium model, which tractably handles multinational firms that engage in export platform sales and that face fixed costs of foreign investment. I first estimate the model using German firm-level data to uncover the size and nature of costs of multinational enterprise and show that the fixed costs of foreign investment are large. Second, I calibrate the model to data on trade and multinational production for twelve European and North American countries. Counterfactual analysis reveals that multinationals play an important role in transmitting technological improvements to foreign countries and that the pending Canada-EU trade and investment agreement could divert a sizable fraction of the production of EU multinationals from the US to Canada. JEL Codes: F12, F23, L23 

Using a micro-level dataset of wind turbine installations in Denmark and Germany, we estimate a structural oligopoly model with cross-border trade and heterogeneous firms. Our approach separately identifies border-related from distance-related variable costs and bounds the fixed cost of exporting for each firm. In the data, firms’ market shares drop precipitously at the border. We find that 40 to 50 percent of the gap can be attributed to national border costs. Counterfactual analysis indicates that eliminating national border frictions would increase total welfare in the wind turbine industry by 4 percent in Denmark and 6 percent in Germany. 

We present a comprehensive data set on the bilateral activity of multinational firms, with focus on two variables: affiliate revenues and the number of affiliates across country pairs. Our basic data are from UNCTAD and include 59 countries, an average over 1996-2001. We implement an extrapolation procedure that fills in missing values using, alternately, FDI stocks and the bilateral number of M&A transactions. Our dataset allows for the analysis of new patterns of multinational production activities across countries, by taking into account firm rather than balance of payment variables, and both the intensive and extensive margins of multinational activities. 

Regressions of price differences between locations in different countries without controlling for the local market structure and the location of origin of the product will lead to a biased estimate of the impact of national boundaries. We demonstrate that non-classical measurement error in distance and unaccounted mark-up differences across countries are responsible for these biases. In a quantitative exercise based on our previous work (Co¸sar et al., 2014), we show that the estimated border effect with price difference regressions overstates the true border effect by a factor of two or more.