Contact Information
117 Skinner Hall
kschmeis@mtholyoke.edu
Phone: 413-538-2752
Fax: 413-538-2323
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~kschmeis

Working Papers

"Learning to Export: Export Growth and the Destination Decision of Firms" (Job Market Paper) (abstract) (paper) In this paper, I find evidence that the geographic expansion of firm exports occurs slowly over time and that a large share of export growth is due to incumbent exporters entering new destinations. I also show that aggregated trade data can underestimate this value and hide the differing composition of export destinations by entering and incumbent exporters. New exporters enter large countries and destinations with characteristics similar to their domestic market. Less similar, distant or less developed countries are entered by firms already exporting to other destinations. I formulate a dynamic general equilibrium model to test if these patterns are due to firms learning how to export (as other recent empirical findings have suggested), or exogenous factors such as productivity growth. In this model, heterogeneous firms experience learning in the form of market entry costs that depend on export history. When calibrated to Russian firm level data, I find that learning plays a significant role in explaining the observed entry patterns, which standard trade models cannot account for. Additionally, by taking learning into account and targeting particular export destinations, governments can better assess the impact of liberalizations.

"Bilateral Export Decompositions" (abstract) (paper) This paper provides a detailed analysis of export growth and the country characteristics that influence different margins. First, I look at Russian firm level data and show the attributes of different export patterns (number of countries exported to, value of exports, etc.) and compare this with sectoral data. I then look at the export country characteristics of Russian firms. Finally, I discuss the similarities between the firm and sectoral data, motivating the significance of observed trends in the product level data. I then look at export growth by newly exported products, products withdrawn from the export market, and continuously exported products exported to new destinations. I show that there is a tendency for richer, larger destinations to experience less growth on each of these margins than poorer, smaller destinations and then discuss a model that accounts for these facts. Additionally, I show that even though many products are withdrawn from one or more destinations, very little export value is lost. I propose model models which are consistent with the findings in the data.

"FDI vs. Exports: Accounting for Industry Differences in Export-Sales Intensities" with Miguel Ricaurte (abstract) (paper) Industry level data shows striking differences among sectors in ratios of exports to FDI sales. We determine what is needed to endogenously generate this pattern of export and FDI sales. By calibrating a model of monopolistic competitive firms, we find that tradability of goods is not enough to capture the observed sectoral differences, as is commonly assumed. We explore variants of the model and show that sector-specific taxes on multinationals and home bias allow us to replicate these differences.

Links

Department of Economics, Mount Holyoke College

Department of Economics, University of Minnesota

MHC Electronic Databases

Trade and Production Database

NBER Data

International Labour Organization

Bureau of Economic Analysis

UNCTAD

Education

Ph.D. in Economics, University of Minnesota (2009)

B.S. in Economics, Montana State University (2003)

Teaching at the University of Minnesota