Finance and Economics Discussion Series

Plant-Level Responses to Antidumping Duties: Evidence from U.S. Manufacturers

Justin R. Pierce
2011-40

Abstract: This paper describes the effects of a temporary increase in tariffs on the performance and behavior of U.S. manufacturers. Using a dataset that includes the full population of U.S. manufacturing plants, I show that an apparent positive correlation between antidumping duties and traditional revenue productivity is likely misleading. For the subset of plants reporting quantity-based output data, increases in prices and markups artificially inflate the effect of antidumping duties on revenue productivity, while physical productivity actually falls. Moreover, antidumping duties allow low-productivity plants to continue producing protected products, slowing the reallocation of resources from less productive to more productive uses.

Keywords: Antidumping, temporary protection, heterogeneous firms, productivity