Carry-Along Trade

Andrew Bernard, Emily Blanchard, Ilke Van Beveren and Hylke Vandenbussche

No 18246, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Large multi-product firms dominate international trade flows. This paper documents new facts about multi-product manufacturing exporters that are not easily reconciled with existing multi-product models. Using novel linked production and export data at the firm-product level, we find that the overwhelming majority of manufacturing firms export products that they do not produce. Three quarters of the exported products and thirty percent of export value from Belgian manufacturers are in goods that are not produced by the firm, so-called Carry-Along Trade (CAT). The number of CAT products is strongly increasing in firm productivity while the number of produced products that are exported is weakly increasing in firm productivity. We propose a general model of production and sourcing at multi-product firms. While the baseline model fails to reconcile the relationships between firm productivity and the numbers of exported products observed in the data, several demand and supply-side extensions to the model are more successful. Looking at export price data, we find support for a novel theoretical extension based on demand-scope complementarities.

JEL-codes: F12 F13 F14 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-07
Note: ITI
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Published as Andrew B Bernard & Emily J Blanchard & Ilke Van Beveren & Hylke Vandenbussche, 2019. "Carry-Along Trade," The Review of Economic Studies, vol 86(2), pages 526-563.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18246.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Carry-Along Trade (2019)
Working Paper: Carry-Along Trade (2012)
Working Paper: Carry-Along Trade (2012)
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:nbr:nberwo:18246

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18246

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().