Identifying foreign suppliers in U.S. import data

Abstract

Relationships between firms and their foreign suppliers are the foundation of international trade, but data limitations and reliability concerns make studying such relationships challenging. We evaluate and enhance supplier information in U.S. import data and present new facts about importerexporter relationships. Count of foreign exporters from U.S. import data tends to exceed those from source country data, especially from China. The pattern of U.S. imports from origin countries changes substantially by tracing trade back to the supplier's location instead. Related-party relationships trade more, while larger countries have more relationships.

Two-Sided Search in International Markets

“…47 Beyond this maximum, the combinatorial possibilities grow very rapidly, making computation impractical. 48 Using customs records from a large sample of countries, and controlling for HS2 sector, Kamal and Monarch (2017) find that the number of foreign firms exporting to the U.S. according to their home country customs records is 73 percent of the number of such firms in the sample countries according to U.S. customs records. The also find large variation in this discrepancy across source countries.…”

Global Value Chains

“…This "relationship-stickiness" measure at the HS 6-digit level correlates positively with prior variables that have been associated with the 44 The identity of the foreign supplier in U.S. import transactions is contained in the "manufacturer ID" variable on U.S. customs forms. This can be prone to inconsistencies in recording, but see Monarch and Kamal (2018) for a description of the data cleaning process they implemented to improve the accuracy of this variable.…”

Bill of lading data in international trade research with an application to the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Lastly, the BoL data contain more complete information on the foreign shipper involved in U.S. import transactions than the LFTTD. In particular, while the LFTTD only includes an alphanumeric code composed of the first few letters of a firm's name and address (see Kamal & Monarch, 2018), the BoL data contain full names and addresses, which can facilitate tracking foreign shippers consistently over time.…”