Alessandro Barattieri

Import Penetration, Intermediate Inputs and Productivity: Evidence from Italian Firms

We test the impact of import penetration on the productivity of a sample of roughly 35,000 Italian manufacturing firms operating in the period 1996-2003, considering the impact on productivity of both import penetration in the same industry and import penetration in the up-stream industries. We also distinguish the source country of imports. We find that: 1) import penetration has a positive effect on productivity. 2) The effects are much larger for import penetration in up-stream industries than for import penetration in the same industry. 3) Imports from the other European countries and the BRICS have more significant impact on the productivity of Italian firms than imports from the US.

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions in services: the role of policy and industrial structure

This paper presents evidence on the determinants of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in services sectors. It develops a stylized model of mergers and acquisitions that predicts that the incidence of merger and acquisition deals depends, inter alia, on the target economys size, industrial structure and investment policies, as well as on bilateral transactions costs. These predictions are examined with bilateral merger and acquisition flow data and detailed information on policy barriers from a new database of restrictions on services investment. The analysis finds that: (1) geographical factors affect mergers and acquisitions in services and manufacturing similarly but cultural factors affect mergers and acquisitions in services more than in manufacturing. (2) Controlling for these bilateral factors, restrictive investment policies reduce the probability of merger and acquisition inflows but this negative effect is mitigated in countries with relatively large shares of manufacturing and (to a lesser extent) services in gross domestic product. The same results hold for the number of merger and acquisition deals received. These findings suggest that the impact of policy is state-dependent and related to the composition of gross domestic product in the target economy.

Estimating Trade and Investment Flows: Partners and Volumes

I present a new stylized fact from a large sample of countries for the period 2000-2006: bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) flows are almost never observed in the absence of bilateral trade flows. I document a similar pattern using bilateral foreign affiliate sales (FAS), aggregating them up from a large firm level dataset (ORBIS), which includes over 45,000 firms. I propose a model where heterogeneous firms can decide whether to serve foreign markets through export or FDI. I derive theory-based gravity-type equations for the aggregate bilateral trade and foreign affiliate sales (FAS) flows. I then suggest a two-stage estimation procedure structurally derived from the model. In the first stage, an ordered Probit model is used to retrieve consistent estimates of the terms needed to correct the flows equations for firms’ heterogeneity and selection into exports and FDI. In the second stage, a maximum likelihood estimator is applied to the corrected trade and FAS equations. The main results of the analysis are as follows: 1) The impact of distance, border and regional trade agreements on the amount bilateral foreign affiliate sales becomes substantially smaller after controlling for selection and firms’ heterogeneity (hence separating the impact on the extensive versus the intensive margin). 2) The same “attenuation” result is found also for the trade equations, consistently with previous literature. 3) When FAS are observed, failing to take this into account when correcting for heterogeneity and selection in the trade equations does not leads to significant differences in the estimated coefficients.

The Connection between Wall Street and Main Street: Measurement and Implications for Monetary Policy

This paper proposes a measure of the extent to which a financial sector is connected to the real economy. The Measure of Connectedness is a measure of the composition of assets, namely the share of credit to the non-financial sectors over the total credit market instruments. The aggregate Measure of Connectedness for the United States declines by about 27 percent in the period 1952-2009. The authors suggest that this increase in disconnectedness between the financial sector and the real economy may have dampened the sensitivity of the real economy to monetary shocks. They present a stylized model that illustrates how interbank trading can reduce the sensitivity of lending to the entrepreneurs net worth, thereby dampening the credit channel transmission of monetary policy. The Measure of Connectedness is interacted with both a structural vector autoregressive model and a factor-augmented vector autoregressive model for the United States economy. The analysis establishes that the impulse responses to monetary policy shocks are dampened as the level of connection declines.