International Finance Discussion Papers (IFDP)
Staff working papers in the International Finance and Discussion Papers (IFDP) series are primarily materials produced by staff in the Division of International Finance. These topics are focused on, though by no means limited to, international macroeconomics, international trade, global finance, financial institutions, and markets, as well as international capital flows.
To Find Relative Earnings Gains After the China Shock, Look Upstream and Outside Manufacturing
Abstract:
We find that US workers outside manufacturing exhibit relative earnings increases after US trade liberalization with China. These relative gains cumulate over time as the beneficial effect of a worker’s upstream exposure—increased competition from China in input markets—more than offsets the detrimental impact of her own and downstream (customer) exposures. These relative gains are smaller for non-manufacturing workers with less ex ante firm tenure and lower initial earnings, and are absent among manufacturing workers due to a lack of upstream gains and stronger downstream losses.
Keywords: Trade, Worker Earnings, Uncertainty
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17016/IFDP.2026.1431
Productivity and Quality of Multi-product Firms
Abstract:
This paper introduces a method for estimating productivity and quality at the firm-product level using a transformation function framework. We use firm optimization conditions to establish a one-to-one mapping between observed data and unobserved productivity and quality. We do not need to impute firm-product input shares and can avoid imposing productivity evolution processes. The method is scalable to numerous products and can address the bias caused by unobserved heterogeneous intermediate input prices. We apply the method to a set of Mexican manufacturing industries and examine the roles of across-firm and within-firm technological spillovers, accounting for the trade-off between productivity and quality. Our quantitative analysis shows that an exogenous, product-specific technological improvement generates substantial gains in welfare, amplified by both within-firm and across-firm spillovers by approximately 17 percent and 5 percent, respectively. Moreover, within-firm resource reallocation toward the most productive products accounts for 60 percent of the resulting firm-level productivity gains.
Keywords: Productivity, multi-product firms, quality, spillover, within-firm reallocation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17016/IFDP.2026.1430
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ISSN 2767-4509 (Online)
ISSN 1073-2500 (Print)