Immigration and firms’ integration in international production networks

Abstract

This paper uses panel data on cross-border migration and transactionlevel trade for Swiss municipalities to identify the effect of migration networks on specific margins of the integration of firms in global value chains. We find that the stability of an international supplier-buyer relationship is strongly associated with a-priori knowledge about the supplier's origin as measured by the migrant network with the same country of origin present in the buyer's immediate environment (here, a municipality). Not only do firms engage in more stable input trading relationships and intensify relationships in terms of input trading volume, but they reduce the total number of suppliers in a given country in response to an increase of immigration from there. These results are in line with a theoretical framework where firms' sourcing strategies are subject to incomplete information. Firms diversify their foreign supplier network in order to be less susceptible to potential bad shocks. Once informational barriers are lifted, firms contract fewer suppliers but purchase a larger volume from each of them.

International talent inflow and R&D investment: Firm-level evidence from China

“…Second, instead of taking R&D investment as an expense, we construct the R&D intensity to conduct another robustness check, which is the total amount of investment in R&D divided by total sales (both in RMB). It shows the contribution of R&D per unit of output (Nemlioglu and Mallick, 2017; and is helpful to avoid selection bias caused by zeros (Egger et al, 2019). The 2SLS estimation results are shown in Panel B of Tables 7 and 8, confirming our earlier results.…”

Migration and the Structure of Manufacturing Production. A View from Italian Provinces

“…Our work is also close to the work examining the effects of immigration on innovation and comparative advantage (Bosetti et al, 2015;Bahar and Rapoport, 2017), which for the case of Italy delivers no significant evidence on the number of patents applications and firms self-reported innovation by firms (Bratti and Conti, 2017). Finally, with our focus on relocation we also contribute to the incipient literature on the role of immigrants in influencing firms' participation to global production networks and their offshoring strategies (Egger et al, 2019;Olney and Pozzoli, 2020). Within these areas of research, we provide our contribution by exploring the changes brought by migrants to the composition of manufacturing with the goal of shedding light on the type of production fostered by their presence in the host economy.…”

Real Effects of Information Frictions: When the States and the Kingdom Became United

“…Columns 4 and 5 exclude no-trade periods, and columns 6 and 7 include the cotton receipts at the New York exchange from the fields to control for possibly expanding cotton production after the American Civil War. 16 Columns 8 and 9 use log of exports as a dependent variable. 17 Overall, the regressions show a consistent positive effect of the telegraph on trade.…”

“…In the online Appendix I show that the telegraph has a positive effect on both world exports from New Orleans and total United States world exports, so the findings in Table 8 cannot be explained by rerouting shipments. 18 16 Alternatively, I run regression specifications as in Table 8 using cotton receipts as a dependent variable. Depending on the specification, cotton receipts either fall or do not change after the telegraph, so an increase in cotton production cannot explain increased exports.…”