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。企业规模的分布符合指数接近于-1的幂定律，这一现象也被称为齐普夫定律(Axtell，2001)。虽然这些文献试图探索齐普夫定律是如何产生的，但人们对其对宏观经济的影响知之甚少。这个项目包括两个部分。第一部分将从理论和数量上检验这种企业规模分布对生产结构、收入、福利和宏观经济波动的影响。同样的框架也将用于评估全球化和体制改革在福利和宏观经济波动方面的作用。该项目的第二部分将从以前从未用于经济分析的独特数据来源收集1974年至今世界上最大的公司的数据。这项研究将首次提供过去30年全球经济演变的企业层面的观点。智力价值最近国际贸易和宏观经济学的研究在理论和经验上都强调了企业之间的显著异质性，并强调需要观察单个企业的决策和结果。然而，在理论上和数量上，我们还没有完全理解所观察到的异质性程度对宏观经济结果的影响，例如福利和总量波动。从经验上看，在利用个别国家的数据集理解企业行为方面已经取得了很大进展。然而，人们对公司规模分布在不同国家之间的比较知之甚少，也几乎不知道公司规模分布在大样本国家中如何随着时间的推移而演变。这个项目将提高我们对大样本国家公司规模分布经验模式的理解，并探索这些模式对宏观经济的理论和数量影响。广泛影响通过关注单个公司对总体结果的影响，该项目将阐明哪些类型的公司和哪些类型的国际贸易应该成为政策的最重要目标。例如，初步分析表明，少数几家大公司和大出口类别对福利的影响远远大于小公司或小进口的众多(该项目的目标之一是使这一说法在数量上准确)。这意味着，除其他外，放松管制的收益要小一些，而统一降低关税的收益要比之前认为的要大得多。此外，这项工作对贸易和经济机构在解释各国发展水平差异方面的作用提供了综合看法，为发展政策的优先事项提供了指导。最后，这一分析的结果之一是，贸易一体化程度的提高可能会导致宏观经济波动加大，从而对社会安全网和国际金融架构的设计产生影响。