National Bureau of Economic Research

About: National Bureau of Economic Research is a nonprofit organization based out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Population. The organization has 2626 authors who have published 34177 publications receiving 2818124 citations. The organization is also known as: NBER & The National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dissecting Trade: Firms, Industries, and Export Destinations

Abstract: We examine entry across 113 national markets in 16 different industries using a comprehensive data set of French manufacturing firms. The data are unique in indicating how much each firm exports to each destination. Looking across all manufacturers: (1) Firms differ substantially in export participation, with most selling only at home; (2) The number of firms selling to multiple markets falls off with the number of destinations with an elasticity of ?2.5; (3) Decomposing French exports to each destination into the size of the market and French share, variation in market share translates nearly completely into firm entry while about 60 percent of the variation in market size is reflected in firm entry. Looking within each of 16 industries we find little variation in these patterns. We propose that any successful model of trade and market structure must confront these facts.

Multinational Enterprises, International Trade, and Productivity Growth: Firm-Level Evidence from the United States

Abstract: We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to substantial productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI spillovers is economically important, accounting for about 14% of productivity growth in U.S. firms between 1987 and 1996. FDI spillovers are particularly strong in high-tech sectors, whereas they are largely absent in low-tech sectors. Small firms with low productivity benefit more from FDI spillovers than larger productivity firms with more productivity do. The evidence for import spillovers is much weaker.

Global, Local, and Contagious Investor Sentiment

Abstract: We construct investor sentiment indices for six major stock markets and decompose them into one global and six local indices. In a validation test, we find that relative sentiment is correlated with the relative prices of dual-listed companies. Global sentiment is a contrarian predictor of country-level returns. Both global and local sentiment are contrarian predictors of the time series of cross-sectional returns within markets: When sentiment is high, future returns are low on relatively difficult to arbitrage and difficult to value stocks. Private capital flows appear to be one mechanism by which sentiment spreads across markets and forms global sentiment.