Large Firms in the World Economy: Theory and Measurement

世界经济和世界贸易是由超大型公司主导的。企业规模的分布很好地近似于指数接近-1的幂律，这种现象也被称为齐夫定律（Axtell, 2001）。虽然文献试图探索齐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。这个项目有两个部分。第一部分将从理论上和定量上考察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价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一个以前未用于经济分析的独特数据源收集1974年至今世界上最大公司的数据。这项研究将首次从企业层面对过去30年全球经济的演变进行观察。最近关于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，并强调有必要研究单个企业的决策和结果。然而，从理论上和数量上讲，我们还没有完全掌握观察到的异质性程度对宏观经济结果（如福利和总波动）意味着什么。从经验上看，在使用单个国家的数据集理解企业行为方面取得了很大进展。然而，我们对企业规模分布在不同国家之间的比较了解甚少，而且对于企业规模分布在大量国家样本中如何随时间演变几乎一无所知。这个项目将提高我们对大量国家样本中企业规模分布的经验模式的理解，并探索这些模式对宏观经济的理论和定量影响。更广泛的影响通过关注单个企业对总体结果的影响，本项目将揭示什么样的企业和什么样的国际贸易应该成为最重要的政策目标。例如，初步分析表明，少数大公司和大型出口类别对福利的影响远远大于众多小公司或小进口（本项目的目标之一是使这种说法在数量上准确）。这意味着，除其他外，放松管制带来的收益较小，而统一关税削减带来的收益远比之前认为的要大。此外，这项工作提供了贸易和经济机构在解释各国发展水平差异方面的作用的综合观点，为发展政策的优先事项提供指导。最后，这一分析的结果之一是，贸易一体化程度的提高可能导致宏观经济波动加剧，这对社会安全网和国际金融架构的设计产生影响。

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.