Importers, Exporters, and Multinationals: A Portrait of Firms in the U.S. that Trade Goods

Abstract

This paper provides an integrated view of globally engaged U.S. firms by exploring a newly developed dataset that links U.S. international trade transactions to longitudinal data on U.S.enterprises. These data permit examination of a number of new dimensions of firm activity, including how many products firms trade, how many countries firms trade with, the characteristics of those countries, the concentration of trade across firms, whether firms transact at arms length or with related parties, and whether firms import as well as export. Firms that trade goods play an important role in the U.S., employing more than a third of the U.S. workforce. We find that the most globally engaged U.S. firms, i.e. those that both export to and import from related parties, dominate U.S. trade flows and employment at trading firms. We also find that firms that begin trading between 1993 and 2000 experience especially rapid employment growth and are a major force in overall job creation.

A survey of empirical studies using transaction level data on exports and imports

“…This fact is documented by Freund and Pierola (2012) ) and the the United States (Bernard et al 2009b). These superstars trade many products with many countries of destination and origin.…”

Multi-product firms and exporting: a developing country perspective

“…Third, multi-product firms may be more attractive to host governments as they should exhibit less susceptibility to demand shocks as 1 Comparisons between our results and Bernard et al (2005Bernard et al ( , 2006a) must be made carefully as the d efinition of whether a firm is multiple product or not depends on how a product is defined. The greater the level of disaggregation, the larger the number of multi-product firms.…”

“…The importance of multi-product firms was first revealed for the US by Bernard et al (2005 and2006a) who show that 41 percent of firms produce more than one product but that multiproduct firms account for 91 percent of total output while multi-product exporters account for more than 95 percent of total exports. An important element of firm heterogeneity therefore is how firms expand or contract their product range in response to changes in trading conditions.…”

A state-dependent model of intermediate goods pricing

“…The model allows for the production cost shocks to be correlated, but I focus on the calibration with only idiosyncratic shocks in order to isolate the role of gaming 2 and Nakamura and Steinsson (2010), for example, use the methodology of Krusell and Smith (1998) to generate …rms'expectations of in ‡ation. 3 International trade data suggest the prevalence of these types of industries in the traded sector. For example, Bernard et al (2009) and Gopinath and Neiman (2011) document the high concentration of trade ‡ows among a small number of large …rms in U.S. and Argentine trade data.…”

“…3 International trade data suggest the prevalence of these types of industries in the traded sector. For example, Bernard et al (2009) and Gopinath and Neiman (2011) document the high concentration of trade ‡ows among a small number of large …rms in U.S. and Argentine trade data. 4 There are only three other papers I am aware of which focus on pricing dynamics such as stickiness and passthrough and that also fall in column (iv).…”