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We estimate the price effect of US import restrictions on washers. The 2012 and 2016 antidumping duties against South Korea and China were accompanied by downward or minor price movements along with production relocation to other export platform countries. With the 2018 tariffs, on nearly all source countries, the price of washers increased nearly 12 percent. Interestingly, the price of dryers—not subject to tariffs—increased by an equivalent amount. Factoring in dryer prices and price increases by domestic brands, the 2018 tariffs on washers imply a tariff elasticity of consumer prices of above one.

Using novel firm-level microdata and leveraging a natural experiment, this paper provides causal evidence for the role of trade and multinational firms in the cross-country transmission of shocks. The scope for trade linkages to generate cross-country spillovers depends on the elasticity of substitution with respect to domestic inputs. Using the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake as an exogenous shock, we structurally estimate production elasticities at the firm level and find greater complementarities in input usage than previously thought. For Japanese affiliates in the United States, output falls roughly one-for-one with declines in imports, consistent with a relationship between imported and domestic inputs that is close to Leontief.

Prior literature has established that displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs. This literature assumes that these are involuntary separations owing to economic distress. This paper examines this assumption by matching survey data on worker-supplied reasons for separations with administrative data. Workers exhibit substantially different earnings dynamics in mass layoffs depending on the reason for separation. Using a new methodology to account for the increased separation rates across all survey responses during a mass layoff, the paper finds earnings loss estimates that are surprisingly close to those using only administrative data.

We measure export participation rates in the US manufacturing sector using a new administrative dataset and compare them to participation rates constructed from the commonly used census of manufacturers (CM). At both the establishment and firm levels, export participation rates are near 40 percent in the administrative data, almost twice as high as in the CM. The discrepancy appears to result predominantly from undercounting of small exporters in the CM. Our findings call for reconsidering the conventional wisdom that around 20 percent of manufacturing firms export.

The period from January 2018 to September 2019 saw an unprecedented increase in tariffs placed on U.S. imports, especially on those originating in China. We document the extent to which tariff exclusions and other factors lowered the average effective tariff on Chinese goods. Given that the large majority of tariff exclusions expired on December 31, 2020, our analysis also indicates that U.S. effective tariffs on Chinese goods increased notably at the start of 2021.

Lags in official data releases have forced economists and policymakers to leverage \"alternative\" or \"non-traditional\" data to measure business exit resulting from the COVID- 19 pandemic. We first review official data on business exit in recent decades to place the alternative measures of exit within historical context. For the U.S., business exit is countercyclical and fairly common, with about 7.5 percent of firms exiting annually in recent years. Both the high level and the cyclicality of exit are driven by very small firms and establishments. We then explore a range of alternative measures of business exit, including novel measures based on paycheck issuance and phone-tracking data, which indicate exit was elevated in certain sectors during the first year of the pandemic. The evidence is mixed, however; many industries have likely seen lower-than-usual exit rates, and exiting businesses do not appear to represent a large share of U.S. employment. Actual exit is likely to have been lower than widespread expectations from early in the pandemic. Moreover, businesses have recently exhibited notable optimism about their survival prospects.

Working Paper No. 25767 We analyze several rounds of U.S. import restrictions against washing machines. Using retail price data, we estimate the price effect of these import restrictions by comparing the price changes of washers with those of other appliances. We find that in response to the 2018 tariffs on nearly all source countries, the price of washers rose by nearly 12 percent; the price of dryers—a complementary good not subject to tariffs—increased by an equivalent amount. Factoring in the effect of dryers and price increases by domestic brands, our estimates for the 2018 tariffs on washers imply a tariff elasticity of consumer prices of between 110 and 230 percent. The 2016 antidumping duties against China—which accounted for the overwhelming majority of U.S. imports—led to minor price movements due to subsequent production relocation to other export platform countries. Perhaps surprisingly, the 2012 antidumping duties against Korea led to relocation of production to China, actually resulting in lower washer prices in the United States. We find that our measure of the tariff elasticity of consumer prices may differ in sign and magnitude from conventional pass-through estimates which are based on a regression of country-specific import price changes on country-specific tariff changes. Production relocation effects, price changes by domestic brands, and price changes of complementary goods all contribute to the differences between these measures.

Using unique transaction-level microdata, this paper documents profit-shifting behavior by U.S. multinational firms via the strategic transfer pricing of intra-firm trade. A simple model reveals how differences in tax rates, both the corporate tax rates across countries and the dividend repatriation tax rate over time, affect the worldwide profit-maximizing transfer-prices set by firms for intra-firm exports and imports. I test the predictions of the model in the context of the 2004 Homeland Investment Act (HIA), a one-time tax repatriation holiday which generated a discreet change in the incentives for U.S. firms to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions. Matching individual trade transactions by firm, product, country, mode-of-transport, and month across arms-length and related-party transactions – following Bernard, Jensen, and Schott (2006) – yields a measure of the transfer-price wedge at a point in time. A difference-in-difference strategy reveals that this wedge responds as predicted by the model: In the period following passage of the HIA, the export transfer price wedge increased in low-tax relative to high-tax countries, while the import transfer price wedge exhibited the opposite behavior. Consistent with the form of tax avoidance known as \"round-tripping\", the results imply $6 billion USD of under-reported U.S. exports, nearly $7 billion USD of over-reported U.S. imports, and roughly $2 billion USD in foregone U.S. corporate tax receipts.

We measure export participation rates in the U.S. manufacturing sector using a new administrative dataset and compare them to participation rates constructed from the commonly used Census of Manufacturers (CM). Both at the establishment and firm level export participation rates are near 40 percent in the administrative data, almost twice as high as in the CM. The discrepancy appears to result predominantly from under-counting of small exporters in the CM. Our findings call for reconsidering the conventional wisdom that around 20 percent of manufacturing firms export.

Prior literature has established that displaced workers suffer persistent earnings losses by following workers in administrative data after mass layoffs. This literature assumes that these are involuntary separations owing to economic distress. This paper examines this assumption by matching survey data on worker-supplied reasons for separations with administrative data. Workers exhibit substantially different earnings dynamics in mass layoffs depending on the reason for separation. Using a new methodology to account for the increased separation rates across all survey responses during a mass layoff, the paper finds earnings loss estimates that are surprisingly close to those using only administrative data.