Andreas Moxnes

Andreas Moxnes’ research revolves around three main topics. The first topic is production networks and firm-to-firm linkages. Moxnes pioneered the use of buyer-seller data for the analysis of international and domestic trade questions. A recent example is his work with Andrew Bernard and Yukiko Saito, published in the Journal of Political Economy, where Moxnes and his coauthors investigate how the production network is changing in response to the opening of a new bullet train line in Japan. They show that travel time matters for finding new suppliers and working with existing suppliers, and that firms benefit from the bullet train because they more easily can find good matches to suppliers and customers. In sum, this translates into significant productivity gains among Japanese firms. The second topic is trade and innovation. How does access to intermediate inputs affect productivity and innovation? And how does better market access impact R&D and technological change? In a recent paper, published in Review of Economics and Statistics, he explores the role of trade liberalization during the 1990s and how improved access for foreign markets, as tariffs decline, generate both more exports and patenting among firms in more than 60 countries worldwide. The third topic is multinational enterprises and international trade. While economic theory has long recognized that exports and multinational production are two ways of selling to foreign markets, micro-level evidence on the interaction between trade and multinational production was missing from the literature for many years. Moxnes work in this area, published in leading journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, has helped researchers and policymakers understand better how trade policy affects multinational activity, and conversely, how barriers to multinational production affect trade.