Rosario Crinò

Betting on exports: Trade and endogenous heterogeneity

We study the equilibrium determinants of firm-level heterogeneity in a model in which firms can affect the variance of their productivity draws at the entry stage and explore the implications in closed and open economy. By allowing firms to choose the size of their investment in innovation projects of unknown quality, the model yields a Pareto distribution for productivity with a shape parameter that depends on industry-level characteristics. A novel result is that export opportunities, by increasing the payoffs in the tail, induce firms to invest in bigger projects with more spread-out outcomes. Moreover, when more productive firms also pay higher wages, trade amplifies wage dispersion by making all firms more unequal. These results are consistent with new evidence on how firm-level heterogeneity and wage dispersion vary in a panel of U.S. industries. Finally, we use patent data across U.S. states and over time to provide evidence in support of a specific mechanism of the model, namely, that export opportunities increase firm heterogeneity by fostering innovation.

The Hidden Cost of Globalization: Import Competition and Mental Distress

We study the effect of import competition on workers’ mental distress. To this purpose, we source information on the mental health of British workers from the British Household Panel Survey, and combine it with measures of import competition in more than 100 industries over 2001-2007. We find an increase in import competition to have a positive, statistically significant, and large impact on mental distress. The effect is strikingly robust to controlling for a wide range of individual, household, and industry characteristics. We show that part of the effect is due to import competition worsening the current labor market situation of individuals, in terms of higher probability of job displacement and lower wage growth. Additionally, and most importantly, we show that import competition worsens mental health also for individuals witnessing no change in observable labor market conditions, by increasing stress on the job and worsening expectations about the future.

Trade, Finance, and Endogenous Firm Heterogeneity

We study how financial frictions affect firm-level heterogeneity and trade. We build a model where productivity differences across monopolistically competitive firms are endogenous and depend on investment decisions at the entry stage. By increasing entry costs, financial frictions lower the exit cutoff and hence the value of investing in bigger projects with more dispersed outcomes. As a result, credit frictions make firms smaller and more homogeneous, and hinder the volume of exports. Export opportunities, instead, shift expected profits to the tail and increase the value of technological heterogeneity. We test these predictions using comparable measures of sales dispersion within 365 manufacturing industries in 119 countries, built from highly disaggregated US import data. Consistent with the model, financial development increases sales dispersion, especially in more financially vulnerable industries; sales dispersion is also increasing in measures of comparative advantage. These results can be important for explaining the effect of financial development and factor endowments on export sales.