IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-05033171.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

International trade and the allocation of capital within firms

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Doerr

    (BIS - Bank for International Settlements)

  • Dalia Marin

    (TUM Technical University of Munich, CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research)

  • Davide Suverato

    (ETH Zurich)

  • Thierry Verdier

    (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

Abstract

This paper introduces an internal capital market into a two-factor model of multi-segment firms. It features empire building by managers and informational frictions within the organization. The headquarters knows less about a segment's true cost than its divisional managers do, so managers can over-report their costs and receive more capital than optimal. Our novel theory, which enables us to endogenize the cost structure of multi-segment firms, shows that international trade imposes discipline on divisional managers and improves the capital allocation between divisions, thereby lowering the conglomerate discount. The theory can explain why exporters exhibit a lower conglomerate discount than non-exporters. We exploit the China shock as an exogenous change to competition to confirm the model's predictions with data on US companies.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Doerr & Dalia Marin & Davide Suverato & Thierry Verdier, 2025. "International trade and the allocation of capital within firms," Post-Print halshs-05033171, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-05033171
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2024.104023
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jan Schymik & Matthias Meier & Alexander Schramm & Alexander Schwemmer, 2025. "Capital (Mis)allocation, Incentives and Productivity," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2025_637, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Multi-product firms; Trade and organization; Internal capital markets; Conglomerate discount; China shock;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F12 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Models of Trade with Imperfect Competition and Scale Economies; Fragmentation
    • G30 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - General
    • L22 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Firm Organization and Market Structure
    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-05033171. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.