Trade Openness and Vertical Structure:Evidence from Korean Firm-Level Data

Recent theories and empirics suggest that trade openness increases world trade through production fragmentation across countries. In this paper we focus on the relationship between trade openness and firms¡¯ choices of vertical structure. We find firm-level data evidence that upon trade liberalization firms have been restructuring their organization by downsizing their domestic production processes (i.e. domestic vertical disintegration), and relocating their input production plants to other countries (i.e. cross-border vertical integration).