event
Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar
Tuesday
03
December
Johannes Boehm

The Comparative Advantage of Firms

Johannes Boehm, Assistant Professor of Economics
, -

Maison de la paix (Geneva), Room S4 Petal 2

The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is the Economics department's weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics.

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As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Johannes Boehm, Assistant Professor of Economics at Sciences Po, Paris. He will present his research entitled The Comparative Advantage of Firms, coauthored with  S. Dhingra and J. Morrow.

Abstract: Multiproduct firms dominate production, and their product turnover contributes substantially to aggregate growth. Theories propose that multiproduct firms grow by diversifying into products which need the same know-how or capabilities, but are less clear on what these capabilities are. Input-output tables show firms co-produce in industries that share intermediate inputs, suggesting input capabilities drive multiproduct production patterns. We provide evidence for this in Indian manufacturing: the similarity of a firm’s input mix to an industry’s input mix predicts entry into that industry. We identify the direction of causality from the removal of size-based entry barriers in input markets which made firms more likely to enter industries that were similar in input use to their initial input mix. We rationalize this finding with a model of industry choice and economies of scope to estimate the importance of input capabilities in determining comparative advantage. Complementarities driven by input capabilities make a firm on average 5% (and up to 15%) more likely to produce in an industry. Entry barriers in input markets constrained the comparative advantage of firms and were equivalent to a 10.5 percentage point tariff on inputs.

Johannes Boehm is currently an Assistant Professor at Sciences Po since September 2014. He was a fellow & visiting assistant professor at Princeton University. His fields of specialization include growth, international trade and, industrial organization.