Contracting Frictions in Global Sourcing

Implications for Welfare

时间：2020年12月29日（周二）10:30-12:00 am

地点：北京大学国家发展研究院致福轩会议室（线上）

主持人：余淼杰，余昌华

主讲人：Ma Lin（National University of Singapore）

摘要: Contracting frictions affect firm sourcing decisions. but how much do such frictions that firms encounter in their interactions with suppliers around the world ultimately matter for trade pat terns and country welfare？ We develop a model of firm global sourcing in the presence of contracting frictions, that we embed into a quantitative general-equilibrium trade framework. At the micro level each firm identifies a set of suppliers for its customized inputs, and these interactions are subject to a bilateral holdup problem, following the Grossman-Hart-Moore property-rights approach to the heory of the firm. For each input, the firm chooses the country to source from, as well as the organizational mode:whether to source from within or outside firm boundaries. These firm-level decisions aggregate into a gravity equation for bilateral trade flows by industry and organizational mode, and hence yield a structural expression for the intrafirm trade share. We derive a closed-form expression for welfare that nests the Arkolakis, Costinot and Rodriguez-Clare（AER 2012） formula, making clear how contracting frictions affect welfare relative to that benchmark. By associating key contracting-related parameters in the model to observables（specifically, input industry character istics and source country rule of law）， we are then able to estimate the model using U.S. data on intrafirm trade shares. We demonstrate through a series of counterfactual exercises how and how much such contracting frictions affect the pattern of trade and country welfare

主讲人: Ma Lin is an assistant professor of economics at NUS. His research interests lie in international economics and macroeconomics. His papers are published in Journal of International Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, World Bank Economic Review. Malin completed her Ph.D. in economics in 2014 at the University of Michigan.