Accounting for Firm Heterogeneity within U.S. Industries: Extended Supply-Use Tables and Trade in Value Added Using Enterprise and Establishment-Level Data

James J. Fetzer, Tina Highfill, Kassu W. Hossiso, Thomas F. Howells III, Erich H. Strassner, Jeffrey A. Young

Chapter in forthcoming NBER book The Challenges of Globalization in the Measurement of National Accounts, Nadim Ahmad, Brent Moulton, J. David Richardson, and Peter van de Ven, editors
Conference held March 9-10, 2018
Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press
in NBER Book Series Studies in Income and Wealth

This paper presents experimental trade-in-value added statistics estimated from extended supply-use tables (SUTs) for the United States for 2005 and 2012 that account for firm heterogeneity. We also present preliminary output from a microdata linking project between the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau on the U.S. semiconductor and other electronic components manufacturing industry to show how different firm characteristics account for heterogeneity. Our experimental results show that imported content of exports as a share of exports varies notably by firm-type within most industries, and that the imported content of exports is concentrated in a few industries, the largest being petroleum manufacturing. Despite the dominance that U.S. and foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) have over trade transactions, both MNEs and non-MNEs make significant contributions to the content of U.S. exports. Estimates based on our microdata linking project suggest that production patterns by ownership, firm size class, and export intensity each exhibit firm heterogeneity to some extent. The ownership criterion best identifies heterogeneity in the value added share of production among the three criteria, while firm size class identifies heterogeneity in the export share of production better than the ownership criterion.

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