This paper leverages a novel detailed dataset of US plant level exporting activity to analyze the effects of information frictions on establishment export decisions. I establish the existence and magnitude of local exporter spillover effects in the US for the first time. I exploit county level variation in export activity to show that reductions in uncertainty about export demand can explain up to a quarter of the variation in establishment export destination and product choice. This effect drives both entry and exit decisions as well as dynamic product-country portfolio composition decisions.
Selling Abroad: A Comprehensive Portrait of US Exporters
(with Stefania Garetto, Lindsay Oldenski, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar, and Natalia Ramondo)
We document a comprehensive set of facts about US-owned exporters. We compare the behavior of US exporters located within the US with the behavior of US-owned exporters located abroad--- i.e., foreign affiliates of US multinational firms. We bring together firm-level data from the US Census Bureau and from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) that span many years and industries. While the Census data has rich information on the export activities of US-based firms, the BEA data contain detailed information on the activity of foreign affiliates of US multinational firms, in particular, their export activities. This permits a novel comparison in the literature between ``domestic'' and ``affiliate'' exporters, both for the cross section and time series, and in particular regarding firms' life-cycle dynamics. These facts are aimed at better informing models of exporters and multinational firms behavior.
(with Christoph Boehm, Aaron Flaaen, and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar) (updated 8/5/2025)
We develop a new algorithm to map confidential firm-level export transactions to their underlying establishments that can be implemented on U.S. microdata. Using this procedure, we construct a novel micro-dataset of U.S. exports at the plant level. Aggregation of these data permits, for the first time, the accurate measurement of exporting at the subnational level (e.g., county, MSA, etc.) in the U.S. The data reveal exports to be much more geographically concentrated than both employment and manufacturing sales, implying that some regions are heavily reliant on foreign demand. To illustrate the consequences of such exposure, we study the effects of the trade collapse during the Great Recession on local labor markets. Counties experiencing greater declines in foreign demand performed worse in terms of employment, pay, and wages during the Great Recession. A similar analysis implemented with publicly available imputed export data—a common practice in the literature—fails to replicate these estimates