The Local-Area Incidence of Exporting

Christoph Boehm, Aaron B. Flaaen, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar and Jan Schlupp

No 34508, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We develop a new algorithm to map confidential firm-level export transactions to their underlying establishments that can be implemented on U.S. microdata. Using this procedure, we construct a novel micro-dataset of U.S. exports at the plant level. Aggregation of these data permits more accurate measurement of exporting at the subnational level (e.g., county, MSA, etc.) than was previously possible. The data reveal exports to be much more geographically concentrated than both employment and manufacturing sales, implying that some regions are heavily reliant on foreign demand. To illustrate the consequences of such exposure, we study the effects of the trade collapse during the Great Recession on local labor markets. Counties experiencing greater declines in foreign demand performed worse in terms of employment, pay, and wages during the Great Recession. A similar analysis implemented with publicly available imputed export data—a common practice in the literature—fails to replicate these estimates.

JEL-codes: F0 F10 F14 F16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11
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