This paper examines the evolution of productivity in U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 1992. We define a vintage effect as the change in productivity of recent cohorts of new plants relative to earlier cohorts of new plants, and a survival effect as the change in productivity of a particular cohort of surviving plants as it ages. Both factors contribute to industry productivity growth, but play offsetting roles in determining a cohort's relative position in the productivity distribution. Recent cohorts enter with higher productivity than earlier entrants did, whereas surviving cohorts show productivity increases as they age. These two effects roughly offset each other, however, so there is a rough convergence in productivity across cohorts in 1992 and 1987.

Plant shutdowns shape industry productivity, the dynamics of employment, and industrial restructuring. Plant closures account for more than half of gross job destruction in U.S. manufacturing. This paper examines the effects of firm structure on U.S. manufacturing plant closures. Plants belonging to multiplant firms and those owned by U.S. multinationals are less likely to exit. However, the superior survival chances are due to the characteristics of the plants rather than the nature of the firms. Controlling for plant and industry attributes, we find that plants owned by multiunit firms and U.S. multinationals are much more likely to close.

This paper examines the factors that increase the probability of entry into exporting. Using a panel of U.S. manufacturing plants, we test for the role of plant characteristics, spillovers from neighboring exporters, entry costs, and government export promotion expenditures. Entry and exit in the export market by U.S. plants is substantial, past exporters are apt to reenter, and plants are likely to export in consecutive years. However, we find that entry costs are significant and spillovers from the export activity of other plants are negligible. State export promotion expenditures have no significant effect on the probability of exporting. Plant characteristics, especially those indicative of past success, strongly increase the probability of exporting, as does changing industries.

We reconcile trade theory with plant-level export behavior, extending the Ricardian model to accommodate many countries, geographic barriers, and imperfect competition. Our model captures qualitatively basic facts about U.S. plants: (i) productivity dispersion, (ii) higher productivity among exporters, (iii) the small fraction who export, (iv) the small fraction earned from exports among exporting plants, and (v) the size advantage of exporters. Fitting the model to bilateral trade among the United States and 46 major trade partners, we examine the impact of globalization and dollar appreciation on productivity, plant entry and exit, and labor turnover in U.S. manufacturing.

Research in international trade has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, as attention has shifted from countries and industries towards the firms actually engaged in international trade. The now-standard heterogeneous firm model posits measure-zero firms that compete under monopolistic competition and decide whether to export to foreign markets. However, much of international trade is dominated by a few “global firms,” which participate in the international economy along multiple margins and account for substantial shares of aggregate trade. We develop a new theoretical framework that allows firms to have large market shares and decide simultaneously on the set of production locations, export markets, input sources, products to export, and inputs to import. Using US firm and trade transactions data, we provide strong evidence in support of this framework's main predictions of interdependencies and complementarities between these margins of firm international participation. Global firms participate more intensively along each margin, magnifying the impact of underlying differences in firm characteristics and increasing their shares of aggregate trade.

Intrafirm Trade and Product Contractibility by Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding and Peter K. Schott. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 444-48 of American Economic Review, May 2010

Wholesalers and Retailers in US Trade by Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding and Peter K. Schott. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 408-13 of American Economic Review, May 2010

Recent research in international trade emphasizes the importance of firms’ extensive margins for understanding overall patterns of trade as well as how firms respond to specific events such as trade liberalization. In this paper, we use detailed U.S. trade statistics to provide a broad overview of how the margins of trade contribute to variation in U.S. imports and exports across trading partners, types of trade (i.e. arm’s-length versus related-party) and both short and long time horizons. Among other results, we highlight the differential behaviour of related-party and arm’s-length trade in response to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.