“Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market.”

Speaker: Samuel Kortum
James Burrows Moffatt Professor of Economics
Department of Economics, Yale University

Talk Summary: Customs data and firm-level production data reveal both the heterogeneity and the granularity of individual buyers, and sellers. We seek to capture these firm-level features in a general equilibrium model that is also consistent with observations at the aggregate level. Our model is one of product trade through random meetings. Buyers, who may be households looking for final products or firms looking for inputs, connect with sellers randomly. At the firm level, the model generates predictions for imports, exports, and the share of labor in production broadly consistent with observations on French manufacturers. At the aggregate level, firm-to-firm trade determines bilateral trade shares as well as labor’s share of output in each country.

An overview of his work with Jonathan Eaton (Penn State) and Francis Kramarz (Ensae-CREST and Ecole Polytechnique).

Bio: Samuel Kortum is the James Burrows Moffatt Professor of Economics at Yale University, Fellow of the Econometric Society, Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Research Associate at the NBER. Before coming to Yale in 2012, he served on the faculty at Boston University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Chicago. Kortum received his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. in Economics from Yale.  In 2004, he and Jonathan Eaton received the Frisch Medal for their paper “Technology, Geography, and Trade.” In addition to international economics, Kortum has written on economic growth, innovation, technology diffusion, and firm dynamics.

“Macroeconomics of Networks”

Speaker: Alireza Tahbaz-Salehi
Daniel W. Stanton Associate Professor of Business
Columbia Business School

Talk Summary: In the first half of the talk, I provide a theoretical framework for how intersectoral input-output networks can translate microeconomic shocks into macroeconomic fluctuations. I then exploit the exogenous and regional nature of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 to obtain a systematic quantification of the role of input-output linkages as a mechanism for the propagation and amplification of shocks.

Bio: Alireza Tahbaz-Salehi is the Daniel W. Stanton Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. His research focuses on the implications of network economies for information aggregation, business cycle fluctuations, and financial stability. 

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