Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 5 November 2025, Zoom
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 5 November 2025, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held via Zoom. Justin Pierce (Federal Reserve System) will be talking about “Importers Big and Small: The Heterogeneous Impacts of U.S.-China Tariffs on Sourcing and Prices”.
More information can be found here:
This paper employs the universe of transaction-level U.S. import data to examine how firms have adjusted their foreign sourcing patterns in response to the 2018-19 U.S. tariffs on China. Consistent with studies based on aggregate data, we find a reallocation of imports away from China and toward other countries. Exploiting the granularity of our data, we show that U.S. firms have diversified imports across source countries in response to tariffs, while increasing the share of imports purchased from foreign affiliates and decreasing their overall value of imports. These aggregate patterns conceal substantial heterogeneity across firms. Large importers were already importing from multiple countries and have been able to reallocate trade with minimal effect on average import prices both in arm’s-length and related-party transactions. They seem to have leveraged market power, benefiting from lower prices on goods sourced from China. Smaller firms faced a more disruptive adjustment, with an increase in average import prices in arm’s-length transactions due to the reallocation of imports to fewer, more expensive source countries.