David E. Weinstein

Globalization and the Gains from Variety

Since the seminal work of Krugman (1979), product variety has played a central role in models of trade and growth. In spite of the general use of love-of-variety models, there has been no systematic study of how the import of new varieties has contributed to national welfare gains in the United States. In this paper we show that the unmeasured growth in product variety from US imports has been an important source of gains from trade over the last three decades (1972-2001). Using extremely disaggregated data, we show that the number of imported product varieties has increased by a factor of four. We also estimate the elasticities of substitution for each available category at the same level of aggregation, and describe their behavior across time and SITC-5 industries. Using these estimates we develop an exact price index and find that the upward bias in the conventional import price index is approximately 1.2 percent per year. The magnitude of this bias suggests that the welfare gains from variety growth in imports alone are 2.8 percent of GDP.

Growth, Economies of Scale, and Targeting in Japan (1955-1990)

This paper explores the usage of various industrial policy tools in Japan. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the authors find that a disproportionate amount of Japanese targeting occurred in low-growth sectors and sectors with decreasing returns to scale. In addition, they find no evidence that productivity was enhanced as a result of industrial policy measures. Copyright 1996 by MIT Press.

Japan's Corporate Groups: Collusive or Competitive? An Empirical Investigation of Keiretsu Behavior

This paper uses data on manufacturing firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange to evaluate whether firms that are part of Japanese financial groups (keiretsu) behave differently from other Japanese firms. The results from this analysis reject the hypothesis that these firms collude in order to raise profits. The data do suggest that keiretsu firms are heavily influenced by their banks to produce at levels beyond those warranted by pure profit maximization. These higher levels of output may also explain why entry into markets with strong keiretsu presence is often described as difficult. Copyright 1995 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Technological Superiority and the Losses from Migration

Two facts motivate this study. (1) The United States is the worlds most productive economy. (2) The US is the destination for a broad range of net factor inflows: unskilled labor, skilled labor, and capital. Indeed, these two facts may be strongly related: All factors seek to enter the US because of the US technological superiority. The literature on international factor flows rarely links these two phenomena, instead considering one-at-a-time analyses that stress issues of relative factor abundance. This is unfortunate, since the welfare calculations differ markedly. In a simple Ricardian framework, a country that experiences immigration of factors motivated by technological differences always loses from this migration relative to a free trade baseline, while the other country gains. We provide simple calculations suggesting that the magnitude of the losses for US natives may be quite large

Happy News from the Dismal Science: Reassessing the Japanese Fiscal Policy and Sustainability

72 billion dollars per year or 0.8 percent of GDP.

Optimal Tariffs: The Evidence

We analyze fiscal policy and fiscal sustainability in Japan using a variant of the methodology developed in Blanchard (1990). We find that Japan can achieve fiscal sustainability over a 100-year horizon with relatively small changes in the tax-to-GDP ratio. Our analysis differs from more pessimistic analyses in several dimensions. First, since Japanese net debt is only half that of gross debt, we demonstrate that the current debt burden is much lower than is typically reported. This means that monetization of the debt will have little impact on Japans fiscal sustainability because Japans problem is the level of future liabilities not current ones. Second, we argue that one obtains very different projections of social security burdens based on the standard assumption that Japans population is on a trend towards extinction rather than transitioning to a new lower level. Third, we demonstrate that some modest cost containment of the growth rate of real per capita benefits, such as cutting expenditures for shrinking demographic categories, can dramatically lower the necessary tax burden. In sum, no scenario involves Japanese taxes rising above those in Europe today and many result in tax-to-GDP ratios comparable to those in the United States.

How Much Do Bank Shocks Affect Investment? Evidence from Matched Bank-Firm Loan Data

The theoretical debate over whether countries can and should set tariffs in response to export elasticities goes back over a century to the writings of Edgeworth (1894) and Bickerdike (1907). Despite the optimal tariff arguments centrality in debates over trade policy, there exists no evidence about whether countries actually apply it when setting tariffs. We estimate disaggregate export elasticities and find evidence that countries that are not members of the World Trade Organization systematically set higher tariffs on goods that are supplied inelastically. The result is robust to the inclusion of political economy variables and a variety of model specifications. Moreover, we find that countries with higher aggregate market power have on average higher tariffs. In short, we find strong evidence in favour of the optimal tariff argument.

Do Factor Endowments Matter for North-North Trade?

We show that supply-side financial shocks have a large impact on firms’ investment. We do this by developing a new methodology to separate firm credit shocks from loan supply shocks using a vast sample of matched bank-firm lending data. We decompose loan movements in Japan for the period 1990 to 2010 into bank, firm, industry, and common shocks. The high degree of financial institution concentration means that individual banks are large relative to the size of the economy, which creates a role for granular shocks as in Gabaix (2011). As a result, idiosyncratic bank shocks i.e., movements in bank loan supply net of borrower characteristics and general credit conditions can have large impacts on aggregate loan supply and investment. We show that these idiosyncratic bank shocks explain 40 percent of aggregate loan and investment fluctuations.

Competition and unilateral dumping

The dominant paradigm of world trade patterns posits two principal features. Trade between North and South arises due to traditional comparative advantage, largely determined by differences in endowment patterns. Trade within the North, much of it intra-industry trade, is based on economies of scale and product differentiation. The paradigm specifically denies an important role for endowment differences in determining North-North trade. This paper provides the first sound empirical examination of this question. We demonstrate that trade in factor services among countries of the North is systematically related to endowment differences and large in economic magnitude. Intra-industry trade, rather than being a puzzle for a factor endowments theory, is instead the conduit for a great deal of this factor service trade.

Globalization, Markups and U.S. Welfare

This paper presents an analysis of the effects of market structure on the propensity of firms to dump goods. The analysis of Brander and Krugman is extended to show that in the presence of transportation costs, bilateral intra-industry trade is not possible without dumping. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this paper finds that firms in markets with a large number of domestic competitors are more prone to dump unilaterally than firms in less competitive markets. This dumping is not predatory but may result in export prices being below average cost.