Download or read book Essays on the Causes and Consequences of Trade Policies written by Lorenzo Rotunno and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on International Trade and International Political Economy written by Thomas Zylkin and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My graduate research has been organized around two main themes: (i) the causes and consequences of trade integration and (ii) the strategic nature of armed conflict. The expansion of international trade over the past sixty years has played a major role is determining the fates of nations, both for better and for worse, and likewise has the potential to shape our futures in ways we need to be able to anticipate. Similarly, the death, destruction, and diversion of productive resources associated with violent conflict continue to present a critical obstacle to shared prosperity. The papers I am presenting as the chapters of my dissertation are representative of the contributions I am interested in making in these important research areas. My research on trade integration spans both the micro-level of what forms trade integration may take as well as higher level concerns about how freer trade will affect both the world economy as well as the individual economies within it. Two chapters of my dissertation, "Beyond Tariffs: Quantifying Heterogeneity in the Effects of Free Trade Agreements" and "Finding the Influence of Communication on Trade" are devoted to this subject. In "Beyond Tariffs", for example, I show, using NAFTA as an empirical case study, that the effects of free trade agreements on individual nations may not be what we might expect to observe ex ante based on tariffs. Relying solely on tariffs to project NAFTA's effects not only greatly underestimates the overall welfare increases for all three NAFTA countries--Mexico's in particular--but also overstates the positive effects of NAFTA on U.S. producer prices. It follows that "heterogeneity" in the effects of free trade agreements, both within and across agreements, may not be well-understood. In "Finding the Influence of Communication", I investigate whether the sharing of a common language promotes trade in a way similar to trade policy and, if so, what the consequences of increased language learning will be for global trade. Most notably, I find the effect of communication in native languages on trade tends to be underestimated in the absence of controls for communication in non-native languages. Surprisingly, while I find strong evidence for the causal impact of foreign language acquisition on manufacturing trade, I do not find similarly strong evidence for services trade. I also find that, unsurprisingly, adding to the world's population of English speakers has by far the largest impact on trade of any major world language. Interestingly, however, when I remove all non-language barriers to trade, I find the forces of geography and history may have greatly impeded the relative appeal of Chinese as a competing global language. The third chapter of my dissertation, "The Problem of Peace: A Story of Corruption, Destruction, and Rebellion", joint with Constantinos Syropoulos, deals with a different kind of question: what are the economic incentives that drive the emergence of destructive conflicts, and of intra-state conflicts ("civil conflicts") in particular? Specifically, we investigate how the central presence of state (fiscal) institutions in civil conflicts generates unique explanations for the emergence of conflict itself. International trade plays an important role in this chapter as well, but mainly as a backdrop for illustrating the unique trade-offs between "peace" and "welfare" that may arise in this context. It is possible for changes in international prices to move in favor of promoting settlements, but such settlements can be associated with (socially wasteful) increases in arming and/or taxation. We also explore, among other things, how limiting the government's fiscal capacity may tilt the balance towards peaceful settlement.

Download or read book The Effects of General Policy Uncertainty on Trade Flows and U S Wages written by Tian Liu and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays at the crossroads of international trade and the labor market. We measure the degree of uncertainty using a general and well-established methodology based on Baker et al. (2016). We investigate the degree to which trade policy uncertainty (TPU) at the industry-country-year level affects the global trade flows of major importers and exporters (e.g., the U.S., Canada, China, Mexico, and the European Union). Similarly, we construct the U.S. index of economic uncertainty at the industry-year level to investigate its effects on U.S. wages. In the first essay, we use a text-mining approach to construct a general index of trade policy uncertainty (TPU) for the U.S. and some of its main trade partners. This TPU index captures uncertainty on U.S. trade policy at a very detailed level (partner and industry levels) from 2001 to 2017 based on US trade-related news information. It's general, thereby enabling us to control for uncertainty relative to the use of highly-regulated tariff barriers under the WTO, temporary trade barriers (TTB), export restrictions, and potential reinterpretations of trade-related national security concerns, among others. Results suggest that a one-standard-deviation increase in policy uncertainty tends to decrease U.S. imports by 1.14 percent. In contrast, uncertainty on the trade policy applied by U.S. trade partners tends to reduce U.S. exports only to markets where the importers display a significant market power level. The results also show that the effects of trade policy uncertainty are mitigated with the formation of preferential trade arrangements (PTAs). In the second essay, motivated by the important findings of U.S. TPU effects on U.S. trade flows, we extend the study to another four markets, namely, Canada, Mexico, China, and the European Union, and their trade partners. We construct a TPU index for each of these four markets based on their news information using the same method applied to the first essay. Again, this TPU index captures uncertainty on the trade policies of these four markets at the importer-exporter-industry level from 2001 to 2017. The primary findings of the second essay are very much in line with the previous results. Uncertainty on the trade policy implemented by Canada, Mexico, China, and the EU tends to lower their imports. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in policy uncertainty is associated with a decline of 0.71 percent in their imports. Moreover, uncertainty on the trade policy applied by the trade partners of these four groups is more likely to reduce their exports. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation increase in TPU leads to a decline of 0.62 percent in these four markets' exports. The impact of trade policy uncertainty on imports and exports for each of the four markets is also negative. In addition, PTAs tend to mitigate the negative effect of trade uncertainties on these four markets' trade flows. In the third essay, we study the reaction of the labor market to the economic uncertainty in the U.S. We specifically construct the U.S. economic uncertainty index with the same method we used to create the TPU in the previous two chapters on wages. The economic uncertainty index is generated based on U.S. economic-related news information that captures uncertainty on U.S. economic events and policies at the industry level from 2001 to 2018. Interestingly, the increase in economic uncertainty is likely to reduce wages in the U.S. labor market. Our result shows that the total effects of the concurrent and lagged economic uncertainty indexes cause a decline in wages by 2.12 percent. We also get plausible results by constructing alternative U.S. economic uncertainty indices using 1) newspapers released by other countries and 2) other countries' economic uncertainty indexes as instruments.

Download or read book Essays in International Trade written by Seung Hoon Lee and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter of this dissertation asks whether forming a business group enhances the export competitiveness of its member firms through a financial channel. More precisely, I claim that forming a business group lowers default risks by diversifying profit sources across various industries and thus allows its member firms to borrow at lower interest rates; in turn, the member firms export more in intensive and extensive margins. I build a model, derive its theoretical implications, and test these implications with Korean firm-level data against alternative explanations. The empirical results suggest that the financial benefit through diversification plays an important role in Korean business groups' superior export performance. The second chapter, coauthored with Kyle Bagwell, analyzes trade policy in a symmetric, two-country version of the Melitz-Ottaviano (2008) model. Our characterizations are influenced by three driving forces corresponding to the selection effect, the firm-delocation effect, and the entry-externality effect. Starting at global free trade, we show that a country gains from the introduction of (1) a small import tariff; (2) a small export subsidy, if transportation costs are low and the dispersion of productivities is high; and (3) an appropriately combined small increase in its import and export tariffs. The welfare of its trading partner, however, falls in each of these three cases. We also offer characterizations of efficient and Nash trade policies. We find that global free trade is generally not efficient, even within the class of symmetric trade policies; and we establish that the import tariff exceeds the export tariff in a symmetric Nash equilibrium. We also provide conditions under which efficient symmetric trade policies entail a total tariff that is positive but below that in a symmetric Nash equilibrium; and we show that, starting at the symmetric Nash equilibrium, countries can mutually gain by exchanging small reductions in import tariffs, export tariffs or combinations thereof. The last chapter, coauthored with Yong Suk Lee, examines how the uncertainty, that arises when countries vie for political influence via economic sanctions, impacts international trade. By separately examining the threat stages of sanctions from the actual impositions, we distinguish the impacts of political uncertainty on trade from that of actual trade disruption. Using a detailed dataset that identifies the timing of sanction threats and impositions, we construct a monthly panel of US sanction cases and bilateral trade between 1992 and 2005. We find that US sanctions significantly reduce US exports to and imports from target countries during the threat stages. The impacts are larger when the target countries are non-democratic states. Furthermore, sanctions motivated by political causes, e.g., war, weapons proliferation, humanitarian crises, etc., tend to have larger impacts than sanctions caused by economic disputes. Our findings suggest that efforts to politically influence other countries generate substantial uncertainty enough to hinder trade flows between sender and target countries.

Download or read book Essays in International Trade Political Economy of Protection and Firm Heterogeneity written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first two chapters study the effect of foreign lobbies on trade policy of a country which is a member of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). They rely on a monopolistically competitive political economy model in which the government determines external tariffs endogenously. In the first paper the effect of foreign lobbying under the FTA is examined empirically using Canadian industry-level trade data that allow differentiating of lobby groups by the country of origin. The analysis suggests that the presence of foreign lobbying has a significant effect on the domestic trade policy: the presence of an organized lobbying group in an FTA partner country tends to raise trade barriers while an organized lobbying group of exporters from outside of the FTA is associated with less protection. The second paper analyses political viability of FTAs and their effect on the world trading system in the presence of lobbying by organized foreign interest groups. I show that the FTA in the presence of an organized lobby group in a prospective partner country may cause an increase in the level of protection against imports from third countries and impede trade with non-member countries. I also find that foreign lobby may encourage the local government to enter a welfare-reducing trade-diverting FTA. Finally, I show that the FTA increases the lobbying power of the organized lobby groups of the member countries, which can potentially obstruct the viability of welfare-improving multilateral trade liberalization. The last paper shows that the reason for a higher capital-labor ratio observed for exporting firms is a higher capital intensity of their production technology. Exporters are more productive, more likely to survive and, hence, more likely to repay loans. A higher repayment probability causes creditors to charge lower interest rate and reduces the marginal cost of the firm when a more capital-intensive technology is used. Here, a reduction in international trade costs stimulates exp.

Download or read book Essays on the Dynamic Effects of International Trade Policy written by Shafaat Yar Khan and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation is comprised of three essays regarding the dynamic effects of changes in trade policy at the firm-level and in the aggregate. The study aims to understand the effects of policy changes when they happen with certainty and when they are uncertain. In the first chapter, we study how anticipation to policy changes overstates the estimated elasticity of substitution, the most important parameter in international trade. Standard identification of this parameter uses tariff variation from Free Trade Agreements (FTA) and assumes that trade flows equal their consumption. However, FTAs eliminate tariffs gradually through announced phaseouts. This allows firms to delay their purchases until tariff cuts are effective while consuming their inventories. Indeed, during NAFTA's staged tariff reductions, imports experienced sizable anticipatory slumps followed by liberalization bumps. A trade model with inventories replicates these dynamics and illustrates that consumed imports provide unbiased estimates of the elasticity of substitution. We propose an empirical measure of consumed imports validated through Monte Carlo simulations. Application to the data shows that using imports instead of consumed imports overestimates the annual elasticity by 68%, the average elasticity by 16%, and increases the ratio of the long- to short-run response from 2 to 3.5. In the second chapter, we study the effects on trade from the annual tariff uncertainty about China's MFN status renewal prior to joining the WTO. We have four main findings. First, in monthly data trade increases significantly in anticipation of uncertain future increases in tariffs. Second, the probability of a tariff increase was perceived to be relatively small, with an average annual probability of non-renewal of about 6 percent. Third, what matters more is the expected future tariff rather than the uncertainty around it. We identify these effects using within-year variation in the risk of trade policy changes around the renewal vote and trade flows. We show that an (s, s) inventory model generates this behavior and that variation in the strength of the stockpiling in advance of the vote is increasing in the storability of goods. Fourth, the costs associated with within year trade policy induced stockpiling account for around 30% of the trade dampening effects of uncertainty found in annual data. Our results explain why trade may hold up in advance of a prospective policy change such as Brexit or the US-China escalating tariff war of 2018-19 but may fall off sharply even if expected tariff increases do not materialize. The third chapter highlights the overestimation of the productivity-enhancing effect of tariff reductions that arise due to a measurement issue. Tariff liberalizations and the associated input tariffs reductions have been documented to result in increased firm level productivity. This is because input tariff reductions shift the composition of firms' inputs towards imported goods. However, foreign inputs entail higher inventory holding costs relative to domestic inputs. We show that neglecting increased inventory costs leads to an upward bias in the productivity gains from trade liberalizations. We build a model of different inventory intensity of home and foreign inputs and show that under standard accounting practices the effect of input tariffs on productivity is biased. The use of estimated inventory deflators based on observables eliminates the bias. We study the relevance of this potential bias during India's trade liberalization in the early 1990s. We find that inventory holdings increased significantly with reduced inputs tariffs and that not accounting for increased inventory costs overestimates TFP gains by around 35%"--Pages ix-x.

Download or read book Essays on the Impact of Trade Policy written by Anita Narendra Srivastava and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on the Macroeconomic Effects of International Trade Policy written by Carter Mix and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation is comprised of two essays regarding the way that aggregate economies respond to changes in international trade policy. Both chapters use quantitative models to determine the predicted effects of changes in either tariffs or trade costs on several aggregate variables. In the first chapter, I develop a multi-country heterogeneous firm model to study the aggregate effects of multilateral trade policy over time. The model captures the slow evolution of production and trade networks in response to trade policy as firms make durable and irreversible investments in sourcespecific productive capacity and destination-specific exporting capacity. It also incorporates capital, international assets, firms, and endogenous labor supply while still matching world geography. The model is calibrated to match size and trade flows of the US and its major trade partners as well as the split of trade between consumption, capital, and material goods. I find that the short run fluctuations in the economy following a policy change are a key determinant of the overall gains from trade and that transitions are not simply represented by gradual convergence to a new steady state. Futhermore, I find that the long-run effects of trade are poorly approximated by quantitative models without dynamics. While all the model features are important, the behavior of the domestic economy in the short- and long-run relies most on the semi-fixed trade networks and intertemporal trade incentives. The model is used to evaluate the effects on the US of being left out permanently or temporarily from a world trade liberalization. Being left out is quite costly, with losses in utility concentrated in the initial periods of the liberalization. The second chapter studies the importance of expectations and news regarding trade policy on the macroeconomy. We evaluate the aggregate effects of changes in trade barriers in a model in which trade responds gradually to changes in trade policy and trade policy changes are gradual. Our model offers insights into how changing trade barriers affects the economy and how business cycle shocks can affect trade. We find that a fall in current trade barriers has an expansionary effect while a decline in future trade costs can be recessionary on impact due to a wealth effect. Furthermore, canceling agreed upon declines in barriers is expansionary in the short-run but substantially lowers growth over the medium run. We also find that even controlling for composition, trade tends to lag the recovery in demand for tradables. We propose a method to separately identify expected and unexpected movements in trade costs. A dynamic model of trade requires both aggregate and forward-looking data to accurately identify the source of trade cost variation"--Pages vi-vii.

Download or read book Essays in International Trade written by Assaf Zimring and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters, studying causes and effects of trade policy. The first two chapters study a policy that was imposed on an economy from the outside - a blockade, while the third deals with policies which are self imposed. In the first chapter, I use detailed household expenditure and price data to study the welfare consequences of the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip between 2007 and 2010. Using the West Bank as a counterfactual, I find that being removed from world markets reduced welfare by 17%-28% on average. Moreover, households with larger pre-blockade expenditure levels experienced disproportionally larger welfare losses. The second chapter uses firm level data to study the effects of the blockade on domestic production in Gaza. I find that the blockade triggered reallocation of workers across firms and sectors, especially from manufacturing to services, and from industries that use imported inputs intensively, or export. In addition, labor productivity fell sharply by 24%. This decline was however significantly higher in manufacturing (39%) than in services (5%). These findings suggest that access to world markets did not only determine the location of the Gaza economy on a given Production Possibility Frontier, but also determined the shape of this PPF. The third and last chapter deals with the the effects of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) on the level of protectionism that member countries use against non members of their PTA. Using data on the use of Anti-dumping Duties by the U.S. before and after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), I find that American industries that were exposed to imports from Mexico became much more likely to receive protection in the form of AD duties relative to industries that were not exposed to imports from Mexico. I interpret these findings as evidence supporting the "protection diversion" hypothesis, according to which countries that enter PTAs will become more aggressive in using protection measures against non-members.

Download or read book NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2000 written by Ben Bernanke and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 2001-02-19 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The NBER Macroeconomics Annual presents, extends, and applies pioneering work in macroeconomics and stimulates work by macroeconomists on important policy issues. Each paper in the Annual is followed by comments and discussion.

Download or read book The Great Trade Collapse Causes Consequences and Prospects written by Richard E. Baldwin and published by CEPR. This book was released on 2009 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Methodology for Impact Assessment of Free Trade Agreements written by Michael G. Plummer and published by Asian Development Bank. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication displays the menu for choice of available methods to evaluate the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It caters mainly to policy makers from developing countries and aims to equip them with some economic knowledge and techniques that will enable them to conduct their own economic evaluation studies on existing or future FTAs, or to critically re-examine the results of impact assessment studies conducted by others, at the very least.

Download or read book The Political Economy of Trade Policy written by Robert C. Feenstra and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers by former students and colleagues celebrates the profound impact that Jagdish Bhagwati has had on the field of international economics over the past three decades. Bhagwati, who is the Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics at Columbia University, has made pathbreaking contributions to the theory of international trade and commercial policy, including immiserizing growth, domestic distortions, economic development, and political economy. His success and influence as a teacher and mentor is widely recognized among students at both MIT and Columbia, and as founder of the Journal of International Economics, he has encouraged research on many questions of theoretical and policy relevance. The political economy of trade policy, Bhagwati's most recent area of interest, is the theme of this collection which addresses salient topics including market distortions, income distribution, and the political process of policy-making. Sections and Contributors Market Distortions, T. N. Srinivasan. Paul A. Samuelson. Paul R. Krugman * Trade and Income Distribution, Douglas A. Irwin. Richard A. Brecher and Ehsan U. Choudri. Robert C. Feenstra and Gordon H. Hanson. Earl L. Grinols * Perspectives on Political Economy, Robert E. Baldwin. Peter Diamond * Models of Political Economy and Trade, Gene M. Grossman and Elhana Helpman. John Douglas Wilson. B. Peter Rosendorff. Arvind Panagariya and Ronald Findlay

Download or read book Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality written by Ms.Era Dabla-Norris and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 39 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.

Download or read book Clashing Over Commerce written by Douglas A. Irwin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 873 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year: “Tells the history of American trade policy . . . [A] grand narrative [that] also debunks trade-policy myths.” —Economist Should the United States be open to commerce with other countries, or should it protect domestic industries from foreign competition? This question has been the source of bitter political conflict throughout American history. Such conflict was inevitable, James Madison argued in the Federalist Papers, because trade policy involves clashing economic interests. The struggle between the winners and losers from trade has always been fierce because dollars and jobs are at stake: depending on what policy is chosen, some industries, farmers, and workers will prosper, while others will suffer. Douglas A. Irwin’s Clashing over Commerce is the most authoritative and comprehensive history of US trade policy to date, offering a clear picture of the various economic and political forces that have shaped it. From the start, trade policy divided the nation—first when Thomas Jefferson declared an embargo on all foreign trade and then when South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over excessive taxes on imports. The Civil War saw a shift toward protectionism, which then came under constant political attack. Then, controversy over the Smoot-Hawley tariff during the Great Depression led to a policy shift toward freer trade, involving trade agreements that eventually produced the World Trade Organization. Irwin makes sense of this turbulent history by showing how different economic interests tend to be grouped geographically, meaning that every proposed policy change found ready champions and opponents in Congress. Deeply researched and rich with insight and detail, Clashing over Commerce provides valuable and enduring insights into US trade policy past and present. “Combines scholarly analysis with a historian’s eye for trends and colorful details . . . readable and illuminating, for the trade expert and for all Americans wanting a deeper understanding of America’s evolving role in the global economy.” —National Review “Magisterial.” —Foreign Affairs

Download or read book Issues in World Trade Policy written by R.H. Snape and published by Springer. This book was released on 1986-06-18 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Handbook of International Trade in Services written by Aaditya Mattoo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides a comprehensive introduction to the key issues in trade and liberalization of services. Providing a useful overview of the players involved, the barriers to trade, and case studies in a number of service industries, this is ideal for policymakers and students interested in trade.