Large Firms in the World Economy: Theory and Measurement

世界经济中的大企业：理论与测量

• 批准号: 0921971
• 负责人: Andrei Levchenko
• 金额: $ 26.61万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-09-15 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0921971&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Large; Firms; World; Economy; Theory

The world economy and the world trade are dominated by extremely large firms. The distribution of firm size is well approximated by a power law with exponent close to -1, a phenomenon also known as Zipf's Law (Axtell, 2001). While the literature has sought to explore how Zipf's Law can arise, much less is known about its implications for the macroeconomy. This project has two parts. The first part will examine, theoretically and quantitatively, the implications of this firm size distribution for the production structure, income, welfare, and macroeconomic volatility. The same framework will also be used to evaluate the role of globalization and institutional reforms in welfare and macroeconomic volatility. The second part of the project will collect data on the largest firms in the world between 1974 and today from a unique data source that has not previously been used in economic analysis. This research will provide, for the first time, a firm-level view of the evolution of the global economy over the past three decades.Intellectual MeritRecent research in international trade and macroeconomics has emphasized, in both theory and empirics, the significant heterogeneity across firms, and stressed the need to look at the individual firms' decisions and outcomes. However, theoretically and quantitatively we have not fully come to grips with what the observed degree of heterogeneity implies for macroeconomic outcomes, such as welfare and aggregate fluctuations. Empirically, great progress has been made in understanding firm behavior using datasets for individual countries. However, very little is known about how firm size distributions compare across countries, and virtually nothing is known about how firm size distributions evolve over time in a wide sample of countries. This project would both improve our understanding of the empirical patterns of firm size distributions in a large sample of countries, and explore theoretical and quantitative implications of these patterns for the macroeconomy.Broader ImpactsBy focusing on the impact of individual firms on the aggregate outcomes, this project will shed light on what kinds of firms, and what kinds of international trade, should be the most important targets for policy. Preliminary analysis suggests, for instance, that the few large firms, and large export categories, matter far more for welfare than the multitude of small firms or small imports (one of the goals of this project is to make this statement quantitatively precise). This implies, among other things, that gains from deregulation are smaller, while gains from uniform tariff reductions are far larger, than was previously thought. In addition, this work provides an integrated view of the role of trade and economic institutions in explaining differences in levels of development across countries, offering guidance for the priorities of development policy. Finally, one of the results of this analysis is that increased trade integration may lead to greater macroeconomic volatility, which has implications for the social safety net and the design of international financial architecture.

世界经济和世界贸易由极大的公司主导。企业规模的分布与幂定律相近，指数接近-1，这一现象也称为ZIPF定律（Axtell，2001）。尽管文献试图探讨ZIPF定律的产生方式，但对其对宏观经济的影响知之甚少。这个项目有两个部分。第一部分将在理论上和定量上检查该公司规模分布对生产结构，收入，福利和宏观经济波动的影响。同一框架还将用于评估全球化和制度改革在福利和宏观经济波动中的作用。该项目的第二部分将从1974年至今的世界上最大的公司收集有关以前未用于经济分析的独特数据源的数据。这项研究将首次提供对过去三十年全球经济发展的公司水平的看法。在理论和经济学上，在国际贸易和宏观经济学方面的智能均可进行的研究强调，在理论和经验中，公司之间的重大异质性，并强调需要研究各个公司的决策和企业的决策和企业。但是，从理论和定量上讲，我们尚未完全掌握观察到的异质性程度所暗示的宏观经济结果，例如福利和骨料波动。从经验上讲，在使用数据集中为各个国家的数据集理解公司行为方面取得了巨大进展。但是，关于公司规模的分布如何比较国家，几乎一无所知，几乎什么都不了解公司规模的分布如何随着时间的流逝而发展。这个项目既可以提高我们对大量国家 /地区企业规模分布的经验模式的理解，又探讨了这些模式对宏观经济的理论和定量含义。Boader的影响力对各个公司对总体成果的影响的影响，该项目将阐明哪些公司以及哪些国际贸易的范围，这些目标是什么，是什么是国际贸易，最重要的目标是最重要的。例如，初步分析表明，少数大公司和大型出口类别对福利的重要性要比众多小公司或小型进口（该项目的目标之一是在定量上精确）。这意味着，除其他外，从放松管制中获得的收益较小，而均匀关税的收益比以前认为的要大得多。此外，这项工作还综合了贸易和经济机构在解释各国发展水平差异的作用，从而为发展政策的优先事项提供指导。最后，该分析的结果之一是，增加的贸易融合可能会导致更大的宏观经济波动，这对社会安全网和国际金融体系结构的设计具有影响。