Multi-product Firms and Trade Liberalization
Multi-product Firms and Trade Liberalization

Author: Andrew B. Bernard

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 66

ISBN-13:

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This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level "ability" and firm-product-level "expertise", both of which are stochastic and unknown prior to the firm's payment of a sunk cost of entry. Higher firm-level ability raises a firm's productivity across all products, which induces a positive correlation between a firm's intensive (output per product) and extensive (number of products) margins. Trade liberalization fosters productivity growth within and across firms and in aggregate by inducing firms to shed marginally productive products and forcing the lowest-productivity firms to exit. Though exporters produce a smaller range of products after liberalization, they increase the share of products sold abroad as well as exports per product. All of these adjustments are shown to be relatively more pronounced in countries' comparative advantage industries.

Product Differentiation, Multi-product Firms and Estimating the Impact of Trade Liberalization on Productivity
Product Differentiation, Multi-product Firms and Estimating the Impact of Trade Liberalization on Productivity

Author: Jan de Loecker

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 46

ISBN-13:

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"In this paper I analyze the productivity gains from trade liberalization in the Belgian textile industry. So far, empirical research has established a strong relationship between opening up to trade and productivity, relying almost entirely on deflated sales to proxy for output in the production function. The latter implies that the resulting productivity estimates still capture price and demand shocks which are most likely to be correlated with the change in the operating environment, which invalidate the evaluation of the welfare implications. In order to get at the true productivity gains I propose a simple methodology to estimate a production function controlling for unobserved prices by introducing an explicit demand system. I combine a unique data set containing matched plant-level and product-level information with detailed product-level quota protection information to recover estimates for productivity as well as parameters of the demand side (markups). I find that when correcting for unobserved prices and demand shocks, the estimated productivity gains from relaxing protection are only half (from 6 to only 3 percent) of those obtained with standard techniques."--abstract.

Trade, Location and Multiproduct Firms
Trade, Location and Multiproduct Firms

Author: Rikard Forslid

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13:

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In this paper we study how trade liberalization affects the location and the product scope of firms. We find that the largest and most productive multiproduct firms concentrate to the larger market as a result of trade liberalization. In the presence of relocation costs, we also find that these firms will expand their product range in the larger market while firms in the smaller market will contract their product scope. These effects are magnified with firm-level productivity. The findings are consistent with Japanese manufacturing firm data.

The Intensive Margin in Trade
The Intensive Margin in Trade

Author: Ana Fernandes

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 66

ISBN-13: 1484386175

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The Melitz model highlights the importance of the extensive margin (the number of firms exporting) for trade flows. Using the World Bank’s Exporter Dynamics Database (EDD) featuring firm-level exports from 50 countries, we find that around 50 percent of variation in exports is along the extensive margin—a quantitative victory for the Melitz framework. The remaining 50 percent on the intensive margin (exports per exporting firm) contradicts a special case of Melitz with Pareto-distributed firm productivity, which has become a tractable benchmark. This benchmark model predicts that, conditional on the fixed costs of exporting, all variation in exports across trading partners should occur on the extensive margin. We find that moving from a Pareto to a lognormal distribution allows the Melitz model to match the role of the intensive margin in the EDD. We use likelihood methods and the EDD to estimate a generalized Melitz model with a joint lognormal distribution for firm-level productivity, fixed costs and demand shifters, and use “exact hat algebra” to quantify the effects of a decline in trade costs on trade flows and welfare in the estimated model. The welfare effects turn out to be quite close to those in the standard Melitz-Pareto model when we choose the Pareto shape parameter to fit the average trade elasticity implied by our estimated Melitz-lognormal model, although there are significant differences regarding the effects on trade flows.

Comparative Advantage and Heterogeneous Firms
Comparative Advantage and Heterogeneous Firms

Author: Andrew B. Bernard

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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This paper examines how country, industry and firm characteristics interact in general equilibrium to determine nations' responses to trade liberalization. When firms possess heterogeneous productivity, countries differ in relative factor abundance and industries vary in factor intensity, falling trade costs induce reallocations of resources both within and across industries and countries. These reallocations generate substantial job turnover in all sectors, spur relatively more creative destruction in comparative advantage industries than comparative disadvantage industries, and magnify ex ante comparative advantage to create additional welfare gains from trade. The relative ascendance of high-productivity firms within industries boosts aggregate productivity and drives down consumer prices. In contrast with the neoclassical model, these price declines dampen and can even reverse the real wage losses of scarce factors as countries liberalize.

New Developments in Productivity Analysis
New Developments in Productivity Analysis

Author: Charles R. Hulten

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13: 0226360644

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The productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s and the resumption of productivity growth in the 1990s have provoked controversy among policymakers and researchers. Economists have been forced to reexamine fundamental questions of measurement technique. Some researchers argue that econometric approaches to productivity measurement usefully address shortcomings of the dominant index number techniques while others maintain that current productivity statistics underreport damage to the environment. In this book, the contributors propose innovative approaches to these issues. The result is a state-of-the-art exposition of contemporary productivity analysis. Charles R. Hulten is professor of economics at the University of Maryland. He has been a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and is chair of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Michael Harper is chief of the Division of Productivity Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Edwin R. Dean, formerly associate commissioner for Productivity and Technology at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is adjunct professor of economics at The George Washington University.