Andrew B. Bernard

Production Networks, Geography and Firm Performance

In a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy, Andrew Bernhard, together with Andreas Moxnes and Yukiko Saito, examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships for firm performance. The researchers develop a model where firms outsource tasks and search for suppliers. Lower search and outsourcing costs lead firms to search more and find better suppliers, which in turn drives down marginal costs. They test the theory by exploiting the opening of a high-speed train line in Japan, which lowered the cost of passenger travel but left shipping costs unchanged. Significant improvements in firm performance were determined as well as the creation of buyer-seller links, consistent with the model.

Andrew Bernard’s current research focuses on the extensive margins of buyer-seller connections and their role in international trade, domestic production networks and firm size and productivity. During his stay at the ifo Institute, he will be working with Jasmin Groeschl on the effects of unexpected disruptions in the cross-border supply network.

Mr Bernard is an expert in international trade and investment and specialises in firm responses to globalisation. In recent papers, he has documented the emergence of factory-less goods producers in the US, revisited traditional views of deindustrialisation and explored the dynamics of new exporters and the role of intermediaries in global trade.

Andrew Bernard is Kadas T’90 Disinguished Professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University. He received his PhD in Economics from Stanford University and was previously on the faculty at MIT and Yale University. He was recently a visiting Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. Mr Bernard is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research as well as a CESifo Research Network Fellow.