Susan Chun Zhu

U.S. Exports and Multinational Production

This paper presents a monopolistic competition model of trade and multinational production that incorporates asymmetric trade barriers and international differences in production costs. The model predicts the functional form for the dependence of U.S. exports and multinational production on tariffs, distance, and production costs. To deal with simultaneity, we estimate the nonlinear equations of U.S. exports and multinational production simultaneously. In the estimation, we also include country fixed effects and allow for endogenous location choice by firms. The estimation yields reasonable estimates of the structural parameters, including the elasticity of substitution. Based on the estimates, we then simulate the effects of trade liberalization. We find that the elimination of tariffs worldwide would increase U.S. exports by 3.0% and U.S. multinational production by 21.7%. This large expansion of U.S. overseas production mainly results from an expected increase in the number of U.S. foreign affiliates in response to tariff reductions.

Global Engagement, Complex Tasks and the Distribution of Occupational Employment

Building on a framework introduced by Chaney and Ossa (2013), we construct a task-based model of the firm’s choice of occupational inputs to examine how that choice varies with greater global engagement. We depart from Chaney and Ossa by assuming that more complex tasks are more costly to complete. Within the structure of our model, firms skew employment toward occupations engaged in more complex tasks. Moreover, the distribution of employment is more skewed for more globalized firms, while it is less skewed for larger firms. These results are consistent with our empirical findings in Davidson, et al (2015).