Robert Feenstra

University of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Economics

We use the structure of the Melitz (2003) model to compute the cost of living and welfare across 47 countries, and compare these to conventional measures of prices and real consumption from the International Comparisons Project (ICP). The cost of living is inferred without directly using ICP prices of traded goods and instead relying on output pric...

This paper quantifies the impact on U.S. employment from imports and exports during 1995–2011, using the World Input–Output Database. We find that the growth in U.S. exports led to increased demand for 2 million jobs in manufacturing, 0.5 million in resource industries, and a remarkable 4.1 million jobs in services, totaling 6.6 million. Two‐thirds...

The modern theory of international trade identifies several additional sources of the gains from international trade beyond the gains from traditional comparative advantage. These are the gains from importing new product varieties; the gains from “creative destruction” as the relatively most productive firms expand their output by exporting while t...

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by the International Comparisons Program (ICP) in 2011 and the OECD in 2014, and can be used to obt...

This chapter addresses the question of what promotes international macroeconomic spillovers by studying the particular case of Mexico, where recessions arising in the US seem to be transmitted with amplification. This particularly strong positive comovement is associated with the rise of offshoring production, the arrangement whereby firms carry ou...

The monopolistic competition model in international trade offers three sources of gains from trade beyond that of traditional comparative advantage: an endogenous expansion in product variety; a pro-competitive reduction in the markups charged by firms; and the self-selection of more efficient firms into exporting. Recent literature on trade with h...

How big is the elasticity of substitution between goods from different countries-the Armington elasticity? Estimates of the macroelasticity between home and imported goods are often smaller than the microelasticity between foreign sources of imports. Using new, highly disaggregate U.S. production data matched to imports and simulated data from a Me...

This paper estimates the impact of globalization on markups, and the effect of changing markups on US welfare, in a monopolistic competition model. We work with symmetric translog preferences, which allow for endogenous markups and firm entry and exit, thereby changing product variety. We find that between 1992 and 2005, US import shares rose and U...

This paper examines the link between trade facilitation and export variety for a broad cross‐section of countries. We measure trade facilitation using port efficiency. We also include the bilateral import tariff and OECD membership and regional trade agreements. We find that port efficiency contributes significantly to the extensive margin of expor...

We describe the theory and practice of real GDP comparisons across countries and over time. Version 8 of the Penn World Table expands on previous versions in three respects. First, in addition to comparisons of living standards using components of real GDP on the expenditure side, we provide a measure of productive capacity, called real GDP on the...

The unit values of internationally traded goods are heavily influenced by quality. We model this in an extended monopolistic competition framework where, in addition to choosing price, firms simultaneously choose quality. We allow countries to have non-homothetic demand for quality. The optimal choice of quality by firms reflects this non-homotheti...

When materials offshoring is measured by estimating imported intermediate inputs, a common assumption used is that an industry’s imports of each input, relative to its total demand, is the same as the economy-wide imports relative to total demand: this is the so-called “import comparability” or “proportionality” assumption. A report to the National...

Recent research has demonstrated the importance of institutional quality at the country level for both the volume of trade and the ability to trade in differentiated goods that rely on contract enforcement. This paper takes advantage of cross-provincial variation in institutional quality in China, and export data that distinguishes between foreign...

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Existing models of offshoring are not equipped to explain how global production sharing affects the volatility of economic activity. This paper develops a trade model that can account for why offshoring industries in low wage countries such as Mexico experience fluctuations in employment that are twice as large as in high wage countries such as the...

In this paper, we examine the organization of export processing operations in China. During the 1990s, export processing accounted for over 50% of China's total exports. We observe China's processing exports broken down by who owns the plant and by who controls the inputs that the plant processes. To account for how parties organize export processi...

The latest World Bank estimates of real GDP per capita for China are significantly lower than previous ones. We review possible sources of this puzzle and conclude that it reflects a combination of factors, including substitution bias in consumption, reliance on urban prices which we estimate are higher than rural ones, and the use of an expenditur...

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This paper examines why credit constraints for domestic and exporting firms arise in a setting where banks do not observe firms' productivities. To maintain incentive-compatibility, banks lend below the amount needed for first-best production. The longer time needed for export shipments induces a tighter credit constraint on exporters than on purel...

This paper presents a novel stylized fact and analyzes its contribution to the skill bias of technical change in U.S. manufacturing. The share of skilled labor embedded in intermediate inputs correlates strongly with the skill share employed in final production. This finding points towards an intersectoral technology-skill complementarity (ITSC). T...

In the early 1990s, trade and labor economists, noting the fall in wages for low-skilled workers relative to high-skilled workers, began to debate the impact of trade on wages. This debate—which led to a sometimes heated exchange on the role of trade versus the role of technological change in explaining wage movements—continues today, with the focu...

Based on a representative …rm sample of Bangladeshi garment industry, this paper shows that the increased presence of FDI …rms in the industry causes those domestic …rms that share common local input suppliers with the FDI …rms to gain in terms of product scope and e¢ ciency. These results are supported by reduced form and structural regressions, d...

An examination of the methods to measure the product variety of imports and the gains from trade due to product variety. The application of the monopolistic competition model to international trade by Elhanan Helpman, Paul Krugman, and Kelvin Lancaster was one of the great achievements of international trade theory in the 1970s and 1980s. Monopolis...

This report, prepared for the Committee on Economic Statistics of the American Economic Association, examines the state of available data for the study of international trade and foreign direct investment. Data on values of imports and exports of goods are of high quality and coverage, but price data suffer from insufficient detail. It would be des...

We study a symmetric AIDS expenditure function that allows for variation in the range of goods. Solving for the reservation prices for goods not available, a convenient form for the expenditure function is obtained. This functional form should prove useful in monopolistic competition models were the range of products changes due to entry and exit.

Abstract Three sources of gains from trade under monopolistic competition are (i) new import varieties available to consumers; (ii) enhanced efficiency as more productive firms begin exporting and less productive firms exit; (iii) reduced markups charged by firms due to import competition. The first source of gains can be measured as new goods in a...

In less than three decades, China has grown from playing a negligible role in world trade to being one of the world's largest exporters, a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate outputs, and other goods, and both a recipient and source of foreign investment. Not surprisingly, China's economic dynamism has generated considerable attenti...

This paper is the first attempt to structurally estimate the impact of globalization on markups and welfare in a monopolistic competition model. To achieve this, we work with a class of preferences that allow for endogenous markups and firm entry and exit that are especially convenient for empirical work – the translog preferences, with symmetry in...

Since 1995, growth in productivity in the United States appears to have accelerated dramatically. In this paper, we argue that part of this apparent speed-up actually represents gains in the terms of trade and tariff reductions, especially for information-technology products. We demonstrate how unmeasured gains in the terms of trade and declines in...

Consistent real income comparisons over time and space are critical for studies on catch-up and convergence. The paper provides an analytical framework for making real income comparisons across countries and over time that satisfy transitivity and at the same time reflect an underlying nonhomothetic utility function for a representative consumer. T...

This paper studies the second-moment properties of offshoring, the arrangement whereby firms carry out particular stages of production abroad. It documents a new empirical regularity: maquiladora industries in Mexico that are associated with US offshoring experience fluctuations in employment that are twice as volatile as the corresponding industri...

Over the last three decades, the value of Chinese trade has approximately doubled every four years. This rapid growth has transformed the country from a negligible player in world trade to the world's second largest exporter, as well as a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate inputs, and other goods. This paper provides an overview of...

Over the last three decades, the value of Chinese trade has approximately doubled every four years. This rapid growth has transformed the country from a negligible player in world trade to the world's second largest exporter, as well as a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate inputs, and other goods. This paper provides an overview of...

This paper studies how a rise in the share of U.S. imports from China, or any country with a fixed exchange rate, can explain a disproportionate fall in exchange rate pass-through to U.S. import prices. A theoretical model provides an explanation working through changes in markups, showing that a particular "local bias" condition is necessary and t...

We propose a new approach to the international comparison of real GDP, as measured from the output-side. The traditional Gary-Khamis system, which measures real GDP from the expenditure-side, is modified to include differences in the terms of trade between countries. It is shown that this system has a strictly positive solution under mild assumptio...

Paul Krugman has become one of the most influential economists of our time. Here we offer a leading trade economist's appreciation of the academic work that won him his Nobel Prize and that is central to mainstream economics today.

This paper studies a model of buyer investment and its effect on the variety and vertical structure of international trade. A distinction is made between two types of buyer investment: "Flexible" and "specific", which differ in the ability of a buyer to match with a seller. The interaction of buyer investment with the entry and pricing incentives o...

This paper provides evidence on the monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms and endogenous productivity. We show that this model has a well-defined GDP function where relative export variety enters positively, and estimate this function over 48 countries from 1980 to 2000. Average export variety to the United States increases by 3.3...

IntroductionChanges in Wages and EmploymentA Simple Model of OutsourcingResults from Empirical StudiesConclusions

The gravity equation explains the amount of trade between countries based on their economic sizes and the distance between them. While it has been in use since the 1960s, its theoretical foundation has been known for a much shorter period, and recent years have seen an large amount of research on its derivation and estimation. We review the theoret...

This chapter examines the relatively neglected issue of estimating sample variance in the context of constructing exact index numbers. Published index numbers are rarely accompanied by an indicator of variability, and it is thus difficult to assess whether a new estimate is significantly different from the previous one. The chapter applies the anal...

This is the text of Professor Robert Feenstra's 'Global Economy Lecture' which he delivered in February 2007. It is part of a lecture series organized jointly by the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw) and the Austrian National Bank (OeNB). In this lecture, Professor Feenstra covers a wide range of issues related to the ongoi...

While outsourcing of production from the U.S. to Mexico has been hailed in Mexico as a valuable engine of growth, recently there have been misgivings regarding its fickleness and volatility. This paper is among the first in the trade literature to study the second moment properties of outsourcing. We begin by documenting a new stylized fact: the ma...

Using data on U.S. intra-firm and arm's-length imports for 5,423 products and 210 countries, we examine the determinants of the share of U.S. imports that are intra-firm. Three determinants of this share have been proposed: (1) Antràs (2003) focuses on the share of inputs provided by the headquarter firm. We provide added confirma-tion and further...

This paper endogenizes the spatial distribution of infrastructure investment and transportation costs. Transportation costs between two addresses depend on cu-mulative infrastructure investment. In a continuous space setting with many in-dependent countries, consumers demand domestic and foreign goods, while central planners care only about welfare...

This paper studies how industry export variety can be constructed and empirically relates trade liberalisation to the expansion of export variety. We document the expansion in export varieties from Mexico due to NAFTA. We also investigate the growth in export variety from China over 1990-2001, and compare those findings to Mexico. Among other findi...

In this paper we develop a monopolistic competition model where firms exercise their market power across multiple products. Even with CES preferences, markups are endogenous. Firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the net profits from a new variety against the costs of "cannibalizing" their own sales. With identical costs across firm...