Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: The Importance of Relocations in U.S. Manufacturing

公司将业务转移到更有利于他们业务的地点。在影响企业制造活动搬迁的问题上，州和地方政府之间为吸引企业而展开的竞争吸引了经济学家、立法者和政策制定者的极大兴趣。只有几项研究关注了制造企业如何在地理上定位其生产，而大多数研究都关注了来自制造业或小地理区域的小样本。作为初步研究，本文利用纵向研究数据库(LRD)或制造业普查(CM)中非公开的工厂和企业层面的数据，总结了1972-1992年间美国制造业工厂搬迁的模式和搬迁后的绩效。这项研究聚焦于单个企业的搬迁决策，在以下三个子项目中对企业制造活动的搬迁信息进行了列表和分析。首先，研究通过构建行业层面的进入、迁移和退出措施来评估跨行业和跨地区转移的相对重要性。这项研究考察了搬迁是否表现出与从头进入和永久退出相比，工厂开工和关闭的不同模式。其次，研究了搬迁植物的特征和搬迁决策。为了分析单个企业生产过程的地理转移特征，研究重点是现有企业在新地点生产产品的新生产设施。基于计量经济学模型的估计将展示税收、工会、要素价格、所有权和其他地理和工厂特定特征如何影响搬迁决策。第三，这项研究通过比较新搬迁工厂和原址现有工厂的产量和生产率增长率，来调查地理变化对企业的影响。乔万诺维奇(1982)的企业学习模型提出的逆生长-年龄关系被测试用于搬迁植物，以检验在年轻公司中观察到的逆生长-年龄关系是否也适用于在新空间重新开始的搬迁植物。

Firms move operations to locations that are more favorable for their business. Competition among state and local governments to lure businesses has attracted considerable interest from economists, as well as legislators and policy makers, regarding issues influencing relocation of firms' manufacturing activities. Only a few studies have looked at how manufacturing firms geographically locate their production, and most of them have looked at small samples from manufacturing or small geographic regions. For an initial study, this dissertation research summarizes the patterns of plant relocation and the post-move performance of relocated plants in the U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1972-1992 using non-publicly available plant and firm level data from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) or the Census of Manufactures (CM). Focusing on an individual firm's decision to relocate, this research tabulates and analyzes information on the relocation of firm's manufacturing activities in the following three subprojects. First, the research assesses the relative importance of the relocation across industries and regions by constructing industry level measures of entry, relocation, and exit. The study examines if relocation shows different patterns in plant openings and closings compared to de novo entry and permanent exit. Second, the research studies the characteristics of relocated plants and the decision to relocate. To analyze characteristics of individual firms' geographic shifts of production process, the research focuses on new production facilities for existing firms to produce a product in a new location. Estimation based on econometric models will demonstrate how taxes, unionization, factor prices, ownership, and other geographic and plant specific characteristics affect the relocation decision. Third, the research investigates the impact of geographic shifts on the firms by comparing the growth rates of output and productivity for newly relocated plants to those for existing plants in the original location. The inverse growth-age relation suggested by Jovanovic's (1982) firm-learning model is tested for relocating plants to examine whether the inverse growth-age relation observed among young firms holds also for the relocating plants that start over in a new space.