MULTINATIONAL FIRMS AND INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CYCLE TRANSMISSION

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Cravino, Javier; Levchenko, Andrei A.
• 署名单位: University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjw043
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 921-962
• 关键词: vertical specialization; Financial crisis; global banks; TRADE; gains; FDI

摘要

We investigate how multinational firms contribute to the transmission of shocks across countries using a large multicountry firm-level data set that contains cross-border ownership information. We use these data to document two novel empirical patterns. First, foreign affiliate and headquarter sales exhibit strong positive comovement: a 10% growth in the sales of the headquarter is associated with a 2% growth in the sales of the affiliate. Second, shocks to the source country account for a significant fraction of the variation in sales growth at the source-destination level. We propose a parsimonious quantitative model to interpret these findings and to evaluate the role of multinational firms for international business cycle transmission. For the typical country, the impact of foreign shocks transmitted by all foreign multinationals combined is non-negligible, accounting for about 10% of aggregate productivity shocks. On the other hand, since bilateral multinational production shares are small, interdependence between most individual country pairs is minimal. Our results do reveal substantial heterogeneity in the strength of this mechanism, with the most integrated countries significantly more affected by foreign shocks.