Alfonso A. Irarrazabal

The Margins of Multinational Production and the Role of Intrafirm Trade

Multinational production (MP) can lead to large gains through international technology sharing. However, empirical evidence suggests that geography matters for MP: Affiliate sales fall in distance from the headquarters. We introduce intrafirm trade into a standard model of exports and MP and show that the model is consistent with firm-level and aggregate evidence. Using a maximum likelihood estimator, we find that intrafirm trade plays a crucial role in shaping the geography of MP. An implication of our work is that MP and exports are very similar activities. Consequently, shutting down MP leads to relatively small welfare losses.

The Tip of the Iceberg: A Quantitative Framework for Estimating Trade Costs

Trade costs are often additive. Well-known examples are quotas, per unit tariffs, and, in part, transportation costs. In spite of this, we have no broad and systematic evidence of the magnitude of these costs. In this paper, we develop a new empirical framework for estimating additive trade costs from standard firm-level trade data. Our results suggest that additive barriers are on average 14%, expressed relative to the median price. The point estimates are strongly correlated with common proxies for trade costs. Using our microestimates, we show that an additive import tariff reduces welfare and trade by more than an equal-yield multiplicative tariff.

Hysteresis in Export Markets

This paper develops a dynamic monopolistic competition model with heterogenous firms to analyze the effects of uncertainty on international trade. We characterize a stationary equilibrium, with N symmetric countries, where firms’ productivities evolve stochastically over time. Our model retains the main results of previous recent papers like Melitz (2003) and Bernard, Eaton, Jensen and Kortum (2003) and provides additional new predictions. Reentry export costs generate hysteresis in export participation creating a band of inaction within the stationary distribution of firms’ productivities. The decision to export becomes history-dependent and new entrants and incumbent firms might sustain temporary negative profits before becoming profitable. Most importantly, the model is very amenable to estimation and simulation, therefore representing a useful tool for analyzing the effects of trade policies. Several moments, like average age, size and productivity of different categories of firms (exporters, entrants, exiters,incumbents), the hazard rate of exiting or of becoming an exporter as a function of age and others have closed-form solutions that are crucial for matching static and dynamic features of the data.

Heterogeneous Firms or Heterogeneous Workers? Implications for Exporter Premiums and the Gains from Trade

We investigate to what extent worker heterogeneity explains the well-known wage and productivity exporter premiums, employing a matched employer-employee data set for Norwegian manufacturing. The wage premium falls by roughly 50% after controlling for observed and unobserved worker characteristics, while the total factor productivity premium falls by 25% to 40%, suggesting that sorting explains up to half of these premiums. Recent trade models emphasize the role of within-industry reallocation of labor in response to various shocks to the economy. Our findings suggest that aggregate productivity gains due to reallocation may be overstated if not controlling for sorting between firms and workers.

Trade Reforms in a Global Competition Model: The Case of Chile

We use a global competition model of international trade with heterogeneous firms to evaluate the impact of trade reforms that occurred in Chile at the end of the 70s. We compare the predictions of the calibrated model in terms of productivity, plant turnover, job and trade flows with what occurred in reality using a comprehensive plant-level panel dataset for the manufacturing sector. The model explains several effects of liberalization reforms on industry performance. In contrast to the previous studies we use a general equilibrium approach that allows fully quantifying and identifying the trade liberalization effects on the tradeable and nontradeable sectors. We proceed by performing a counterfactual experiment aimed at exploring the impact of preferential trade agreements negotiated by Chile in recent years with the EU and NAFTA.

OPEC's Market Power: An Empirical Dominant Firm Model for the Oil Market

We estimate a dominant firm-competitive fringe model for the crude oil market using quarterly data on oil prices for the 1986-2009 period. All estimated structural parameters have the expected sign and are significant. We find that OPEC exercised market power during the sample period. Counterfactual experiments indicate that world GDP is the main driver of long-run oil prices, however, supply (depletion) factors have become more important in recent years.

Misallocation and the recovery of manufacturing TFP after a financial crisis

The Chilean economy experienced a decade of sustained growth in aggregate out-put and productivity after the 1982 .nancial crisis. This paper analyzes the effects of resource misallocation on total factor productivity (TFP) of the manufacturing sector by applying the methodology of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) to the establishment data from the Chilean manufacturing census. We find that a reduction in resource misallocation accounts for about 46 percent of the growth in manufacturing TFP between 1983 and 1996. The improvement in allocative effciency, moreover, is essentially driven by a reduction in the cross-sectional dispersion of output distortion. In particular, a reduction in the least productive plants.output subsidies is the most important reason for the reduction in resource misallocation during this period.