CES-WP-09-38
Plant-Level Responses to Antidumping Duties: Evidence from U.S. Manufacturers
Justin Pierce
October 01, 2009
This paper describes the effects of a temporary increase in tariffs on the performance and
behavior of U.S. manufacturers. Using antidumping duties as an example of temporary
protection, I compare the responses of protected manufacturers to those predicted by models of
trade with heterogeneous firms. I find that apparent increases in revenue productivity associated
with antidumping duties are primarily due to increases in prices and mark-ups, as physical
productivity falls among protected plants. Moreover, antidumping duties slow the reallocation of
resources from less productive to more productive uses by reducing product-switching behavior
among protected plants.
53 Pages 457721 Bytes
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CES-WP-09-37
The Effect of Wage Insurance on Labor Supply: A Test for Income Effects
Henry Hyatt
October 01, 2009
Studies of moral hazard in wage insurance programs such as Unemployment Insurance
(UI) or Workers Compensation (WC) have demonstrated that higher benefits discourage work,
emphasizing the price distortion inherent in benefit provision. Utilizing administrative data
linking WC claim records to wage records from a UI payroll tax database, I find that the effect of
WC benefits on the duration of benefit receipt cannot fully account for the effect of these
benefits on post-injury unemployment. This indicates that a significant fraction of the effect of
WC benefits on employment is due to an income effect rather than a price distortion.
36 Pages 158439 Bytes
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CES-WP-09-36
Clusters of Entrepreneurship
Edward Glaeser, William Kerr, Giacomo Ponzetto
October 01, 2009
Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both
across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this
relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs
or raise entrepreneurial returns, thereby increasing net returns and attracting entrepreneurs. A
second class of theories hypothesizes that some places are endowed with a greater supply of
entrepreneurship. Evidence on sales per worker does not support the higher returns for
entrepreneurship rationale. Our evidence suggests that entrepreneurship is higher when fixed
costs are lower and when there are more entrepreneurial people.
53 Pages 307114 Bytes
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CES-WP-09-35
The Center for Economic Studies 1982-2007: A Brief History
B.K. Atrostic
October 01, 2009
More than half a century ago, visionaries representing both the Census Bureau and the external research community laid the foundation for the Center for Economic Studies (CES) and the Research Data Center (RDC) system. They saw a clear need for a system meeting the inextricably related requirements of providing more and better information from existing Census Bureau data collections while preserving respondent confidentiality and privacy. CES opened in 1982 to house new longitudinal business databases, develop them further, and make them available to qualified researchers. CES and the RDC system evolved to meet the designers’ requirements. Research at CES and the RDCs meets the commitments of the Census Bureau (and, recently, of other agencies) to preserving confidentiality while contributing paradigm-shifting fundamental research in a range of disciplines and up-to-the-minute critical tools for decision-makers.
24 Pages 86485 Bytes
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CES-WP-09-34
Mom-and-Pop Meet Big-Box: Complements or Substitutes?
John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, C.J. Krizan
September 01, 2009
In part due to the popular perception that Big-Boxes displace smaller, often family owned
(a.k.a. Mom-and-Pop) retail establishments, several empirical studies have examined the evidence
on how Big-Boxes’ impact local retail employment but no clear consensus has emerged. To help
shed light on this debate, we exploit establishment-level data with detailed location information
from a single metropolitan area to quantify the impact of Big-Box store entry and growth on
nearby single unit and local chain stores. We incorporate a rich set of controls for local retail
market conditions as well as whether or not the Big-Boxes are in the same sector as the smaller
stores. We find a substantial negative impact of Big-Box entry and growth on the employment
growth at both single unit and especially smaller chain stores – but only when the Big-Box
activity is both in the immediate area and in the same detailed industry.
46 Pages 224047 Bytes
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