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

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 US Bureau of Economic Analysis and the US Census Bureau on the US 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 US and foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) have over trade transactions, both MNEs and non-MNEs make significant contributions to the content of US 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.