\"It's Not You, It's Me\": Breakups in U.S.-China Trade Relationships

Ryan Monarch

No 1165, International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: Costs to switching suppliers can affect prices by discouraging buyer movements from high to low cost sellers. This paper uses confidential U.S. Customs data on U.S. importers and their Chinese exporters to investigate these costs. I find considerable barriers to supply chain adjustments: 45% of arm?s-length importers keep their partner, and one-third of switching importers remain in the same city. Guided by these regularities, I propose and structurally estimate a dynamic discrete exporter choice model. Cost estimates are large and heterogeneous across products. These costs matter for trade prices: halving switching costs reduces the U.S.- China Import Price Index by 14.7%.

Keywords: International Trade; import prices; Transactional Relationships (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 F14 F23 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/ifdp/2016/files/ifdp1165.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: "It's Not You, It's Me": Breakup In U.S.-China Trade Relationships (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgif:1165

DOI: 10.17016/IFDP.2016.1165

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in International Finance Discussion Papers from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().