Download or read book Essays on International Trade and International Macroeconomics written by Ana Filipa Vieira Nadais and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation consists of three essays studying different aspects of international economics. The first two chapters focus on international trade, namely on estimating the size of trade barriers by looking at how firms manage their inventories, while Chapter 3 focus on international macroeconomics; in specific, the likelihood of a country to default on its debt when there is an informal sector. The first chapter provides evidence supporting the common assumption that international fixed ordering costs are higher than domestic fixed ordering costs. The canonical inventory model (the EOQ model) is extended to include two inputs sourced from different countries. Given the demand for each of the inputs, the fixed ordering costs and the inventory holding cost, the firm decides the optimal quantity to order each period. The model is estimated using firmlevel data on inventories of raw materials and inputs used from domestic and international sources. Assuming constant returns on inventory holding costs, the model reveals that it is between 20 and 60 times more expensive to place an order internationally than domestically, but yields an elasticity of inventories to demand much smaller than in the data. Allowing for a more general holding cost structure, that depends on the level of inventories in stock captures the variation of inventories' cost with firm's size. With this more general setup, foreign ordering costs are estimated to be between 3.5 and 5.2 times higher than domestic, suggesting that there are strong economies of scale in holding inventories. Those estimates are corroborated when I allow total fixed ordering costs to depend on total demand as this specification results in international fixed ordering costs between 4.1 and 7.2 times higher than domestic. The second chapter uses firm-level data on inventory holdings and source of inputs to estimate domestic and international trade barriers looking not only at fixed costs, but also at time lags and computing their tariff equivalents. It starts by documenting three features related to inventories, import decisions, and firm's size. First, inventories increase strongly in size, with an elasticity right below one. Second, importers hold more inventories than non-importers and third, inventories increase in import intensity. Given inventory carrying costs, the inventory holdings are used to infer relative domestic and international trade barriers. I develop a model of heterogeneous firms that produce using imperfectly substitutable domestic and imported intermediates and face demand and supply uncertainty. Given ordering costs and delivery lags that differ by source country, interest charges and inventory holding costs, producers use inventories to economize on trade costs. I find it is 5 times more costly to place an international than a domestic order but, when scaled by average shipment size, the international fixed ordering cost is just twice as large; the international time lag is 3 times larger than the domestic and there is complementarity in inputs, reflected in higher domestic inventories to domestic purchases ratio for importers than for non-importers. Overall, domestic and international trade frictions have a 17.3% tariff equivalent. I decompose these tariffs into their three components and observe that due to the substitutability between fixed ordering costs and inventory holding costs, these barriers have the same relevance while that of time lag is slightly smaller. This framework can then be used to evaluate the benefits of infrastructure investments and policy changes to reduce time delays, uncertainty or fixed ordering costs. The last chapter starts from the observation that, although emerging markets are often characterized by a large informal sector, frequent default and procyclical fiscal policies, sovereign default models proposing explanations for the high sovereign bonds interest rate spreads faced by developing economies have abstracted from the existence of the informal sector and its role. To address this concern, I propose a mechanism through which the size of the informal sector impacts a country's default decision. I extend a small open economy sovereign default model by including an informal and a formal sector and pro-cyclical fiscal policies, where a benevolent government makes default and tax decisions in order to maximize agent's utility and satisfy its level of public spending. I conclude that the taxable base decreases in the size of the informal sector leading to more distortions, which translate into higher tax rates, and more frequent defaults and that these results are magnified over the business cycle"--Pages vi-viii.

Download or read book Two Essays on International Trade and Macroeconomics written by Hamed Atrianfar and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two chapters. The first one is an empirical study in international trade which investigates the effect of an intensified competition on the price and quality of traded goods. The second one is a theoretical study in macroeconomics that incorporates the theory of efficiency wage in a competitivesearch equilibrium with adverse selection.Chapter 1: Competing on Price and Quality: Theory and Evidence from Trade DataImport competition induces firms either to reduce their markup, upgrade their quality, or both. Modern models of international trade typically consider one margin of adjustment to explain the consequences of import competition. However, examining U.S. import data suggests that firms actively respond by adjusting bothquality and markup. This paper develops and calibrates a Ricardian model of trade which incorporates the endogenous response of quality and markup to import competition. Countries are heterogeneous both in physical efficiency and quality capability. Firms engage in a two-dimensional Bertrand competition in whichthey simultaneously choose the price and quality of output. Estimation results indicate that developed countries are more productive both in physical and quality production. Moreover, in response to import competition, developed countries mainly upgrade quality, while developing countries mainly reduce the markup. Ignoring the quality channel would underestimate the gains from trade that the U.S. derives with developed countries and overestimate the gains from trade with developing countries. The counterfactual experiment indicates as the U.S. economy grows, it benefits more from free trade with quality-capable countries than with countries which are less capable.Chapter 2: Efficiency Wage, Competitive Search and Adverse SelectionThis paper investigates the theory of efficiency wage (wage per unit of efficiency) in a competitive search equilibrium with adverse selection. Firms post wages. Workers whose efficiency is private information decide where to apply after observing posted wages. A separating equilibrium is characterized. Contrary to the result derived in Weiss (1980), not only unemployment rises in response to a negative shock (e.g., output price fall), but each unit of efficiency is also rewarded less. Moreover, I extend the model to a general equilibrium setting in which the product market is monopolistically competitive. Comparative statics show that moving toward a more competitive market induces an increase in the efficiency wage and a decrease in the output price. However, while the rise in the relative measure of firms to workers lowers the output price, its effect on the efficiency wage is indeterminate.

Download or read book Essays on International Trade and Macroeconomics written by Jaume Ventura and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Empirical Methods in International Trade written by Mordechai Elihau Kreinin and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Internationalization of the world economy has made trade a key factor in the growth potential of nearly every economy. Hence, economists have become increasingly interested in the determinants of international trade and competitiveness. Empirical Models i

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics of an Open Economy written by Franz Gehrels and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The large aggregates in the economy - consumption, investment, production of the domestic and the international sectors, international capital flows, financial accumulation and indebtedness - are analysed in this book as problems in time-optimisation for enterprises and households. The effects of fiscal and monetary policies along with exchange-rate variation are examined, and their simultaneous use for stabilizing demand are found to be necessary. All household decisions on consumptions, savings, and financial disposition are conditioned by uncertainty, and similarly for firms, who make more complex simultaneous decisions on production, real investment, financing, and market strategy. The marginal efficiency-of-investment function derived from these decisions is fundamentally different from the marginal productivity of capital in the neoclassical sense. An economy which grows through the accumulation of capital, increase in labor supply, and technological progress is the framework in which all of these variables move. This codetermines the allocation of factors between domestic and international production, and the development of foreign trade. The growth both of the public debt and of international investment are treated in depth.

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics and International Trade written by Sebastian Heise and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on International Trade and Business Cycles written by Daisoon Kim and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This research investigates how international trade and business cycles vary with characteristics of industries. The first chapter documents cost side industry heterogeneity across narrowly defined industries. The second and third chapters study the short run (international business cycle) and long run (home market effect) phenomenon, respectively. The research contributes to a better understanding of how the supply side industry heterogeneity plays a vital role in international trade and macroeconomics. The first chapter provides a method to estimate the cost structure. The approach relies on cost minimization and free entry condition with frictions, which allows decomposing sources of economies of scale into a sloping marginal cost curve and fixed cost. The US manufacturing industry data show that industry-level economies of scale are more strongly associated with marginal costs than fixed costs. The second chapter shows that the industry's international business cycle patterns vary systemically by the slopes. In industries with decreasing marginal costs, output, imports, and exports are all more correlated with aggregate GDP than in industries with increasing marginal costs. To rationalize the observed patterns, this chapter introduces sloping marginal cost curves and their variations across industries in an open economy macroeconomic model. It delivers endogenous export gains/losses and within-firm links between domestic and export markets which generate two attractive features of the model: (i) it raises model-implied cross-country aggregate GDP comovements which are close to the data, and (ii) it reproduces observed industrial international business cycle patterns. The results suggest that sloping marginal cost curves and their heterogeneity are informative to understand the international business cycle. The third chapter studies how industry characteristics determine the home market effect: the impact of country size on trade surplus and the location of industries. This chapter constructs a two-country multi-industry new trade model that allows for various supply- and demand-side industry characteristics. A novel feature of the model is that economies of scale arise not just from fixed costs, but also from sloping marginal cost curves. The model predicts that large countries have a higher concentration of industries in which (i) marginal costs are an important source of economies of scale, and (ii) products are more differentiated. This chapter tests these theoretical predictions using a gravity-based specification and introduces instrumental variables to fix measurement error and proxy problems. The empirical results are consistent with the main predictions of the model. The results show that the primary building blocks of new trade theory, economies of scale and product differentiation, are central to understanding international trade patterns in narrowly defined industries. The research supposes that a non-linear cost function and variations in cost structure across industries improve our understanding of international trade and business cycles.

Download or read book Trade Stability and Macroeconomics written by George Horwich and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trade, Stability, and Macroeconomics: Essays in Honor of Lloyd A. Metzler provides information pertinent to the fundamental aspects of trade, stability, and macroeconomics. This book covers a variety of topics, including nontraded and intermediate commodities, prices, production, exchange rates, and wages. Organized into five parts encompassing 22 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the theory of international trade and the effect of a tariff or export tax on domestic prices. This text then defines the supply of the international commodities as a function of their prices and of the output of the domestic commodity. Other chapters consider the Stolper–Samuelson analysis of the effects of protection of the distribution of income. This book discusses as well the theory of external–internal balance or the assignment problem as related to macroeconomic policy in an open economy. The final chapter deals with the dynamic allocation of scarce resources. This book is a valuable resource for economists.

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics and International Trade written by Spencer G. Lyon and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics and International Trade written by Amy Southard Brown and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics and International Trade written by Mauro Rodrigues and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book International Trade and Economic Dynamics written by Takashi Kamihigashi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-10-16 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned trade theorist Koji Shimomura passed away in February 2007 at the age of 54. He published nearly 100 articles in international academic journals. The loss of this extremely productive economist has been an enormous shock to the economic profession. This volume has emerged from the great desire on the part of the profession to honor his contributions to economic research. Contributors include authoritative figures in trade theory such as Murray Kemp, Ronald Jones, Henry Wan, and Wilfred Ethier, world-renowned macroeconomists such as Stephen Turnovski and Costas Azariadis, and leading Japanese economists such as Kazuo Nishimura, Makoto Yano, Ryuzo Sato, and Koichi Hamada. This broad range of contributors reflects Koji Shimomura’s many connections as well as the respect he earned in the economic profession. This volume offers the reader a rare opportunity to learn the views of so many renowned economists from different schools of thought.

Download or read book Essays on International Trade and Macroeconomics written by Chujian Shao and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I focus on studying three questions about international trade including the interactions between trade and immigration, how trade liberalization influences skill upgrading decisions and the linkages between health investment and trade openness. In the first chapter, I develop a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring endogenous firm entry, heterogeneous firms and endogenous labor migration to study whether trade and immigration are substitutes or complements and investigate the macroeconomic consequences of low barriers to labor mobility with emphasizing the roles of the extensive margins of production and trade in shaping immigration dynamics. First, the model predicts that trade and immigration potentially act as substitutes, which is consistent with the derivation from the Heckscher-Ohlin model of trade. Second, high-skilled labor migration makes the labor-sending country worse off due to less output and firm entry, and changes in migration costs create asymmetric welfare effects on high-skilled and low-skilled households. Third, the firm entry channel provides new insights into immigration dynamics: (i) more firm establishments demand more immigrants, and (ii) inflows of immigrants induce firm entry and result in higher labor costs in the long run. The second chapter is a joint work with Castiel Chen Zhuang and Qiliang Chen. We observe that India’s average applied effective tariff declines by about 15 percentage points and exports to the Indian market by Chinese manufacturing firms increase a lot from 2004 to 2007, but the change in the average tariff in the rest of the world is nearly zero during the same period. Motivated by this fact, we examine the impact of an Asian trade agreement, APTA, on skill upgrading by Chinese manufacturers. First, we develop a general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous export and employee training decisions to explain firm performance following trade liberalization. Second, we test the theoretical model based on general difference-in-differences estimations, showing that firms facing higher reductions in India’s tariffs increase investment in on-the-job training faster. The effects of trade openness on export participation and training spending of firms are the largest in the middle range of productivity, which is consistent to our model prediction. In the third chapter, my co-author, Qiliang Chen, and I study the interactive effects of trade openness and health investment. There is a positive correlation between trade and health outcomes, and increased exports or imports encourage more healthcare spending. However, there are only few theoretical studies addressing the questions that if trade integration is good for health and if health improvement encourages more trade. We develop a two- country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms, health capital accumulation and endogenous firm entry and labor supply to analyze what channels affect the interconnection between trade and health. Three main results emerge. First, there is positive association between trade openness and health investment. An increase in health investment boosts both the number of exporters and export values as health improvement stimulates economic growth and increases income. Trade openness increases healthcare spending and the stock of health capital because of the income and product variety effects. Second, the dynamic impacts of changes in aggregate productivity on key variables could be underestimated if workers’ health status and health investment decisions are neglected. Third, health investment could crowd out physical capital investment and new firm entrants.

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics and International Trade written by Mykola Ryzhenkov and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics International Trade and the Environment written by Shiva Sikdar and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on International Trade Macroeconomics and Development written by Lorenzo Caliendo and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis has two chapters. Chapter 1, I study the dynamics of the two-country, two-sector Heckscher-Ohlin model. I present a complete and closed form characterization of the equilibrium dynamics with initial factor endowments outside the cone of diversification where factor prices are not equalized and either one or both of the countries specialize. The model can help to explain why countries experience non-monotonic changes in their pattern of specialization as they grow, why countries do not converge, and why non-factor price equalizations might be the most likely outcome after all. Chapter 2, which is a joint work with Fernando Parro, presents a new model for trade policy analysis. We build into a Ricardian model the role of trade in intermediate inputs, sectoral linkages and differing productivity levels across sectors. The model can be used for both ex-ante and ex-post trade policy evaluation. We also propose a new method to estimate sectoral trade elasticities. Estimation requires only trade and tariff data and does not require the assumption of bilaterally symmetric trade costs. With the model and estimates of sectoral trade elasticities for the year 1993, we evaluate the trade and welfare effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). We do so by incorporating into the model the change in tariffs from 1993 to 2005 to calculate the implied changes in exports and imports. We compare these calculated changes to their observed counterparts and find that the model matches the observed outcomes well. We find that as a consequence of the tariff reductions, real wages increased in all NAFTA countries. Mexico had the largest gains, while Canada and the United States gained relatively more from trade liberalization against the rest of the world than from trade liberalization within NAFTA over the sample period

Download or read book Openness for Prosperity written by Herbert Giersch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrates the essential connection between theoretical academic research and the creation of economic policy, reflecting his belief that the study of economics should lead to improvement of the social order and of the quality of human life. Herbert Giersch is one of Germany's most prominent economists and an outstanding contributor to the debate on European economic policy. Openness for Prosperity brings together his major essays in macroeconomic policy, written or published over the past two and a half decades. In these twenty nontechnical essays, Giersch clearly demonstrates the essential connection between theoretical academic research and the creation of economic policy, reflecting his belief that the study of economics should lead to improvement of the social order and of the quality of human life. Some of the policy positions that Giersch favors are free trade, limits to government, and openness of economies to future possibilities.The chapters are arranged in two parts with the first focusing on economic growth and structural change and the second on issues of monetary policy, inflation, and exchange rates. The essays are arranged chronologically according to the dates of publication or writing to suggest how topics and emphases have changed over time.The first part, reflecting Giersch's support of Schumpeter's views, includes essays on aspects of growth, protectionism in foreign trade, the role of entrepreneurship in the 1980s, prospects and problems for European economic integration in the 1990s, the lessons to be learned from West Germany's transition to a market economy, and the author's vision of the European and world economies at the end of this century. In the second part, essays address such issues as flexible exchange rates, indexation, IMF surveillance over exchange rates, neglected aspects of inflation, the effect of central bank independence on monetary policy, and the relationship between real exchange rates and comparative economic growth.