Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Alfaro, Laura; Chen, Maggie X.
• 署名单位: Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research; George Washington University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-ECONOMIC POLICY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7731
• DOI: 10.1257/pol.20150437
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 1-38
• 关键词: FOREIGN DIRECT-INVESTMENT; trade liberalization; domestic firms; INTERNATIONAL-TRADE; multiproduct firms; exchange-rates; spillovers; IMPACT; GLOBALIZATION; agglomeration

摘要

Assessing productivity gains front multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive productivity gains are often attributed to productivity spillovers; however, an alternative, much less emphasized channel is selection and market reallocation., whereby competition leads to factor and revenue reallocation within and between domestic firms and exits of the least productive firms. We investigate the roles of these different mechanisms in determining aggregate-productivity gains using a unifying framework that explores the mechanisms' distinct predictions on the distributions of domestic firms: within-firm productivity improvement shifts rightward or reshapes the productivity distribution, while selection and market reallocation move the revenue and employment distributions leftward and raise left truncations. Using a rich cross-country firm-level panel dataset, we find significant evidence of both mechanisms and effects of competition in product, technology, and labor space. However, selection and market reallocation account for the majority of aggregate-productivity gains, suggesting ignoring this channel could lead to substantial bias in understanding-the nature of productivity gains from multinational production.