Trade and firm heterogeneity in a Schumpeterian model of growth

The present paper explores the effect of trade liberalization on the level of productivity as well as the rate of productivity growth in an R&D-based model with heterogeneous firms. We introduce new and plausible features that are absent in existing studies. First, technical progress takes the form of continual quality improvement of products over time. Second, firm entry and exit are endogenously determined due to creative destruction of products. In this framework, we demonstrate that a lower transport cost or export sunk cost unambiguously reallocates resources to R&D and top-quality product industries from low-quality good industries. This means that trade liberalization increases the rate of technical progress as well as the level of manufacturing productivity. These results are found to be robust in an extended model with population growth without scale effects.     

Price dispersion in a directed search model

This paper investigates a directed search model in which some buyers are uninformed about prices. We find that sellers' strategies are given by discrete distributions in any symmetric pricing equilibrium. When the proportion of uninformed buyers is sufficiently high, the unique symmetric pricing equilibrium involves a countably infinite number of atoms.     

Trade liberalization,firm entry,and income inequality

This paper examines the short‐ and long‐run effects of trade liberalization via tariff reductions on income inequality in an economy, which is characterized by an imperfectly competitive urban manufacturing sector and a perfectly competitive rural agricultural sector. Tariff reductions reduce domestic output in the importable urban manufacturing sector, leading to shifts of capital from the urban sector to the rural agricultural sector. This can narrow the wage gap between skilled and unskilled labor in the short run. However, the lowered capital cost attracts new firms, and subsequently excessive entry of firms, to the urban manufacturing sector. This firm entry effect can mitigate the favorable effect of tariff reductions on wage inequality in the long run. Empirical study confirms the findings.     

A model of firm heterogeneity in factor intensities and international trade

Empirical evidence suggests that exporters are, in addition to being more productive, significantly more skilled‐labour intensive than non‐exporters. In a setting that captures both these features, we show that the firm selection induced by trade liberalization works along two dimensions. First, export growth increases competition for skilled labour. This leads to the exit of some of the skilled‐labour intensive firms, while benefitting unskilled‐labour intensive ones. Second, within the group of firms with the same factor intensities, the reallocation of factors is towards the exporters. We show that the increased competition for skilled labour dampens the positive effect of trade liberalization on sector‐wide TFP and real income.     

Efficiency in large markets with firm heterogeneity

Empirical work has drawn attention to the high degree of productivity differences within industries, and its role in resource allocation. In a benchmark monopolistically competitive economy, productivity differences introduce two new margins for allocational inefficiency. When markups vary across firms, laissez faire markets do not select the right distribution of firms and the market-determined quantities are inefficient. We show that these considerations determine when increased competition from market expansion takes the economy closer to the socially efficient allocation of resources. As market size grow large, differences in market power across firms converge and the market allocation approaches the efficient allocation of an economy with constant markups.     

Globalization and labor market outcomes: Wage bargaining, search frictions, and firm heterogeneity

We introduce search unemployment into Melitz's trade model. Firms' monopoly power on product markets leads to strategic wage bargaining. Solving for the symmetric equilibrium we show that the selection effect of trade influences labor market outcomes. Trade liberalization lowers unemployment and raises real wages as long as it improves average productivity. We show that this condition is likely to be met by a reduction in variable trade costs or by entry of new trading countries. Calibrating the model shows that the long-run impact of trade openness on the rate of unemployment is negative and quantitatively significant.     

Risk sharing and export performance with firm heterogeneity

We investigate how market uncertainty affects the export performance of a firm through financial frictions. We first extend Melitz's (2003) heterogeneous firm trade model by incorporating demand shocks, linking the demand uncertainties to the financing costs of firms. In this extension, the default probability is endogenously determined by a firm's productivity and demand uncertainty. Hence, firms with higher productivity or lower market uncertainty are offered lower interest rates and thus show better export performance. As an application, we also show that a risk-sharing mechanism, that pools default risk for a certain group of firms, lowers the default risk. This mechanism allows banks to charge lower interest rates to the member firms and therefore ultimately improves their export performance in both extensive and intensive margins. We find a real-world example of such a mechanism from business groups in Korea. Using Korean firm-level data, we show that the more diversified the business group, the greater the likelihood that its member firms export and the bigger their export revenues. We also show that our results are robust to alternative explanations for Korean business groups’ export competitiveness.     

Indeterminacy and directed search

The directed search approach assumes each seller posts a fixed price and, ex post, randomly allocates the good should more than one buyer desire the good. This paper assumes sellers can post prices which are contingent on ex post realized demand; e.g. an advertisement might state the Bertrand price should there be more than one buyer, which corresponds to an auction outcome. Competition in fixed prices and ex post rationing describes equilibrium behavior. There is also real market indeterminacy: a continuum of equilibria exists which are not payoff equivalent. Sellers prefer the equilibrium in auctions.     

Export market participation with sunk costs and firm heterogeneity

In this article we investigate the importance of sunk costs, firm characteristics and spillovers from nearby exporters on a firm's decision to participate in exporting. The empirical analysis involves the estimation of a nonstructural, discrete choice, dynamic model with firm heterogeneity. By using panel data for Estonian companies from 1994 to 1999 we find that: (i) both sunk costs and observable firm characteristics are important determinants of export market participation; (ii) previous history matters, in that, if a firm has been exporting the previous period or the period before, it significantly increases the likelihood of the firm exporting in the current period; (iii) larger firms with high capital intensity and foreign ownership are more likely to be exporters; (iv) operating in an export-oriented industry increases a firm's likelihood of exporting.     

Introduction to the special issue on firm performance and worker heterogeneity using Chinese Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) dataset

ABSTRACT

The Chinese Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) is the first dataset that links firm performance with worker heterogeneity in China, and therefore is a precious data resource for various research topics. This note introduces the CEES dataset, as well as seven papers that serve as the initial step in applying the CEES dataset. The topics covered include interaction between firm-level behavior and worker-level features, for example, firm innovation, quality upgrading, government intervention, worker’s cognitive and non-cognitive abilities, and labor protection. The ample information documented by CEES dataset is worth exploring in the future research agenda.     

Trade theorems with search unemployment

Abstract We revisit the Heckscher‐Ohlin‐Samuelson model in the presence of labour market frictions à la Mortensen‐Pissarides. Relaxing the assumption of the one‐worker‐one‐firm matching rule, we show that the Stolper‐Samuelson theorem and the Rybczynski theorem may not hold in specific circumstances. We also demonstrate that the Factor Price Equalization theorem is valid only for capital and unemployed labour across countries, but not for employed labour. In equilibrium, trade patterns are determined by countries’ factor endowments and relative factor intensities in sectors (independent of factor intensities in production). Finally, our results suggest an additional explanation for the ‘missing trade’ phenomenon.     

Product quality and firm heterogeneity in international trade

This paper quantifies the separate contributions of product quality and technical efficiency in explaining variation in export outcomes across US manufacturing plants. Unlike previous studies that rely on unit values, I estimate idiosyncratic demand from price and quantity information. I find substantial across‐plant heterogeneity in demand, and consistent with the quality interpretation, demand is positively correlated with advertising expenditures, wage rates and material costs. I use this variation to explain across‐plant heterogeneity in export outcomes. The results show that, in addition to productivity, idiosyncratic demand is an important determinant of selection into exporting and the levels of foreign sales.     

Wage inequality and overeducation in a model with efficiency wages

Abstract.  This paper shows that the existence and persistence of 'overeducation' can be explained by an extension of the efficiency wage model. When calibrated to fit the amounts of overeducation found in most empirical studies, the model implies that both the relative wage and the relative employment of high‐skill workers depend inversely on aggregate economic activity. Keeping aggregate employment constant, furthermore, low‐skill unemployment rises, following an increase in the relative supply of high‐skill labour, and relative wages may be insensitive to changes in relative labour supplies. The model may help to explain rising wage inequality in some countries since the early 1970s. JEL classification: J31     

Collective bargaining,firm heterogeneity and unemployment

We compare labor market outcomes under firm-level and sector-level bargaining in a one-sector Mortensen-Pissarides economy with firm-specific productivity shocks. Our main theoretical results are two-fold. First, unemployment is lower under firm-level bargaining, due both to a lower job destruction rate and a higher job-finding rate. Key to this result is the interplay between firm heterogeneity and wage compression under sector-level bargaining. Second, introducing efficient opting-out of sector-level agreements suffices to bring unemployment down to its level under decentralized bargaining.     

Optimal fiscal policy under monopolistic competition with firm heterogeneity

Government spending is a policy instrument used to sustain economic development and improve social welfare. Empirical observations, however, reveal a significant decrease in the government spending to GDP ratio for the United States. In addition, the United States has been observed to exhibit a rise in firm heterogeneity in productivity in recent decades. This paper shows that the optimal size of government expenditure will decrease as firm heterogeneity increases. We thus indicate that the rise in firm heterogeneity in productivity may serve as a plausible vehicle to explain the decline in the share of government spending in GDP for the United States.     

Corporate profit tax,firm entry with unemployment,and income inequality

In this paper, we provide a general equilibrium analysis of corporate profit tax on income distribution, unemployment, and wage inequality. With firm dynamics in industrial sector, we identify a new channel through which profit tax affects income and wage inequality: profit tax cut will widen not only the wage gap between skilled and unskilled labor, but also exacerbate the wage inequality of unskilled labor among different sectors. The welfare effect of profit tax cut depends on unemployment deepening (labor-distortion effect) and more manufacturing firms enter the market (business-creation effect), eroding the market share of incumbent firms (business-stealing effect).     

Wage–vacancy contracts and multiplicity of equilibria in a directed search model of the labour market

This paper studies a directed search model of the labour market, which is standard in all aspects except two. First, we allow firms to post wage–vacancy contracts advertising the number of workers they would pay as well as the payment all will receive. Second, we consider two cases: one where workers are risk neutral and one where workers are risk averse, both in finite and large economies. Our paper shows that when firms post wage–vacancy contracts, whether workers are modelled as risk neutral or risk averse matters: the types of symmetric equilibria and the nature of multiplicity of equilibria are different. Somewhat surprisingly, when there are finite numbers of risk‐neutral workers and firms, we obtain a finite number of symmetric equilibria, but when workers are risk averse, we obtain a continuum of equilibria. Furthermore, our paper sounds a cautionary note on using large economies as an approximation of finite economies: when workers are risk neutral, the nature of equilibrium is preserved going from a finite to a large economy, but the nature of equilibrium is different when workers are risk averse.     

Trade and industrial structure with large firms and heterogeneity

We develop a model of trade and firm heterogeneity in an oligopolistic setting. This setting generates key differences in terms of modelling setup, modelling predictions and welfare implications with respect to the existing literature on trade and firm heterogeneity. In terms of modelling setup our approach allows us to explore interaction between potentially large heterogeneous firms, in contrast to recent trade literature with heterogeneity and atomistic firms. As a result variables like market price and total sales vary endogenously as different firms enter the market. We offer a solution for the integer problem inherent in small group models, based on stochastic dominance. The model generates testable predictions deviating from the benchmark firm heterogeneity model of Melitz (2003) in terms of the effect of trade liberalisation on markups, market shares, the market price. We also derive predictions on the effect of distance and market size on the probability of zero trade flows and export prices. Our model features the possibility that welfare declines as a result of trade liberalisation. The result in Brander and Krugman (1983), the benchmark model for trade under oligopoly, that welfare unambiguously rises with free entry and might decline without free entry due to increased cross-hauling is reversed. In a setting with heterogeneous instead of homogeneous firms, welfare might decline with free entry. A negative welfare effect without free entry can be ruled out if the firm size distribution is sufficiently dispersed.     

Endogenous inequality and fluctuations in a two-country model

We study a two-country version of Matsuyama's [K. Matsuyama, Financial market globalization, symmetry-breaking, and endogenous inequality of nations, Econometrica 72 (2004) 853-884] world economy model. As in Matsuyama's model, symmetry-breaking can be observed, and symmetry-breaking generates endogenously determined levels of inequality. In addition, we show that when the countries differ in population size, their interaction through credit markets may lead to persistent endogenous fluctuations.     

High profit equilibria in directed search models

We consider a model of directed search where the sellers are allowed to post mechanisms with entry fees. Regardless of the number of buyers and sellers, the sellers are able to extract all the surplus of the buyers by introducing entry fees and making price schedules positively sloped in the number of buyers arriving to their shops. This is in contrast to results that are achieved for large markets under the assumption that sellers cannot influence the utility of any particular buyer (market utility assumption), in which case buyers obtain strictly positive rents. If there is a bound on the prices or on the entry fees that can be charged, then the equilibrium with full rent extraction does not exist any more, and the market utility assumption is restored for large markets.