Three Essays on International Trade and Productivity

Three Essays on International Trade and Productivity PDF Author: Siwook Lee
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Three Essays on International Trade and Productivity

Three Essays on International Trade and Productivity PDF Author: Siwook Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description


Three Essays on International Trade and Productivity

Three Essays on International Trade and Productivity PDF Author: Michael James Nower
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Three Essays in International Trade

Three Essays in International Trade PDF Author: Thomas Chaney
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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(Cont.) This model provides some argument for competitive revaluations. In chapter 3, I build a dynamic model of trade with heterogeneous firms which extends the work of Melitz (2003). As countries open up to trade, they will experience a productivity overshooting. Aggregate productivity increases in the long run, but it increases even more so in the short run. When trade opens up, there are too many firms, inherited from the autarky era. The most productive foreign firms enter the domestic market. Competition is fierce. The least productive firms that are no more profitable are forced to stop production. Not only do the most productive firms increase their size because they export, but the least productive firms stop producing altogether. Aggregate productivity soars. As time goes by, firms start to exit because of age. Competition softens. Some less productive firms resume production. This pulls down aggregate productivity. The slower the exit of firms, the larger this overshooting phenomenon. This model also predicts that the price compression that accompanies trade opening may be dampened in the long run. It also predicts that inequalities should increase at the time when a country opens up to trade, and then gradually recede in the long run.

Three Essays on International Trade and Regional Productivity

Three Essays on International Trade and Regional Productivity PDF Author: Hanpil Moon
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ISBN:
Category : Industrial productivity
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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A firm's productivity is composed of two parts: pure technical change and location-specific (agglomeration) externalities. Regional productivity is thus an aggregation of productivity of firms producing similar goods and located in a given region. International trade can affect both components of regional productivity. First, trade openness in a closed economy may alter its internal economic geography. Some regions which become more attractive to firms than before gain an advantage over others from integration into global markets. Second, as a competition pressure, trade liberalization forces the least productive firms to exit, resulting in the growth of aggregate productivity in the industry. The three essays presented in this dissertation explore the relationship between international trade and regional productivity in the presence of heterogeneous firms. In the first essay, a theoretical framework is introduced in order to describe how the above two channels, through which trade affects regional productivity, shape a country's spatial distribution of productivity. Results show that industries, each having its own cost-minimizing location, can be spatially relocated within a country via heterogeneous trade liberalization across industries. Moreover, trade intensifies localization for each industry since most firms in an industry move to or gather around their industry-specific cost- minimizing location. The consequent clustering of firms generates additional localization economies. More importantly, the intensification of localization economies can slow or delay the selection process, i.e. exit of low productivity firms, following trade liberalization. These findings suggest that trade openness induces significant industrial and spatial dynamics (entry, exit and survival) within an economy. The second and third essays are empirical tests on the second channel through which trade openness affects regional productivity using county-level data from Korea and firm-level data from India, respectively. In addition to trade liberalization, regional infrastructure is considered to be another competition pressure for domestic firms, i.e. improved infrastructure in a region induces a similar selection process among firms. These empirical essays investigate the effect of falling trade costs and improving domestic infrastructure on the regional variation of raw productivity using a common methodology. That is, a spatial econometric procedure is applied to a production function framework to estimate total factor productivity (TFP) by region and industry, while controlling for potential external and spatial effects. The mean and alternative percentiles of the regional raw productivity distribution are then specified as functions of international and domestic competition indicators. International competition is represented by trade costs, which are estimated as frictions in a gravity-type trade model, while road density is considered to capture the level of a region's infrastructure. In both Korea and India, it is found that trade costs reduction significantly shifted to the right, particularly the 10th percentile value of, the regional productivity distribution. However, a change in the level of infrastructure appears to bring about a higher change in regional productivity relative to a change in the international competition level. Therefore, the relative contribution of trade costs and infrastructure to regional productivity should be evaluated with attention to the costs underlying these options for regional development.

Three Essays in International Trade and Industrial Organization

Three Essays in International Trade and Industrial Organization PDF Author: Ayșe Ozgür Pehlivan
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 94

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Three Essays on Firm Productivity in Industrial Organization and International Trade

Three Essays on Firm Productivity in Industrial Organization and International Trade PDF Author: Hongsong Zhang
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Three Essays on International Trade

Three Essays on International Trade PDF Author: Seungrae Rae Lee
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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This dissertation consists of three essays in international trade. The first chapter analyzes integration strategies of Korean firms that involve producing final products and providing post-production services for serving geographically separate foreign markets: high-income and low-income countries. I present a model in which heterogeneous firms must provide services for products through their subsidiaries in host countries, but can produce output in different locations. The model shows that the firm's equilibrium decision depends on its own productivity level and economic variables that affect production location and providing services. Using plant- and firm-level data of Korean firms, the empirical analysis provides the results that support the model's predictions.

Three Essays on International Trade

Three Essays on International Trade PDF Author: Su Wang (Ph. D.)
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 152

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This thesis consists of three essays about international trade and wage inequality. Essay I characterizes optimal trade and FDI policies in a model with monopolistic competition and firm-level heterogeneity similar to Helpman et al. (2004). I find that both the optimal import tariffs and the optimal FDI subsidies discriminate against the more profitable foreign firms. This is because of the existence of a wedge between the private incentives of exporting and FDI firms, and the incentive of the representative agent. Essay II develops an elementary theory of global supply chains. It considers a world economy with an arbitrary number of countries, one factor of production, a continuum of intermediate goods, and one final good. Production of the final good is sequential and subject to mistakes. In the unique free trade equilibrium, countries with lower probabilities of making mistakes at all stages specialize in later stages of production. Using this simple theoretical framework, it offers a first look at how vertical specialization shapes the interdependence of nations. Essay III proposes a model that has as ingredients heterogeneity of workers and firms, complementarity between occupations within each firm and complementarity between workers and firms/occupations. The competitive equilibrium features positive assortative matching and leads to both within- and between- firm wage variations. Comparative static results are then derived to generate new insights about changes in these components of wage inequality.

Three Essays on International Trade Policy and Political Economy

Three Essays on International Trade Policy and Political Economy PDF Author: Inderjit Kohli
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Essays on International Trade and Industry Dynamics

Essays on International Trade and Industry Dynamics PDF Author: Bernardo Diaz De Astarloa
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation consists on three essays on international trade and industry dynamics. All three essays study empirical applications of open economy environments with heterogeneous firms who make decisions over time.The first essay studies trade policy and the dynamics of the solar photovoltaic manufacturing industry in the U.S. In it I develop a computable, continuous-time dynamic model of the industry where domestic firms engage in price competition against each other and an importing sector to sell solar panels to domestic consumers. Firms can attain cost reductions through learning by doing and R&D investments. I use the model to estimate its main parameters using firm-level survey data from the Department of Energy and then simulate the application of countervailing duties to imports of solar panels, analyzing the implications for the evolution of the industry and welfare. In a scenario where a 30% duty is applied to imports, domestic firms respond by increasing R&D expenditures, therefore increasing productivity and setting lower prices, even when concentration increases as high productivity domestic firms gain market share.The second essay is on the dynamics of the textiles and garments industry in Bangladesh. First, it shows that, in contrast to the standard description of entry into foreign markets, Bangladeshi exporters are fully committed to foreign markets, exporting most of their output abroad; they start big, not small, and show high survival rates once they start exporting. They are born to export firms who operate in orphan industries, with essentially missing domestic demand for their products. In addition to the usual fixed and sunk costs of exporting, they must face presumably higher costs of starting up new businesses. Then it compares these patterns with those of China, Colombia and Taiwan, and find similar but less-striking patterns for China. These features seem to be missing in Taiwan and Colombia, which accord with other typical cases described in the literature. Finally, it adapts a search and learning model of export dynamics to show how the presence of high sunk costs of establishing a new business and the absence of a domestic market can generate export trajectories similar to the ones we observe in Bangladesh. The third essay focuses on the links between productivity and exporting. The trade literature has identified three relationships. First, that productivity causes exporting, so that there is selection into exporting by more productive firms. Second, that exporting generates productivity growth through, for example, learning-by-exporting. Third, that firms make choices that make them more productive in preparation to export. The essay shows that patterns of Chinese exporters are consistent with all three hypotheses. Exporters are more productive than non-exporters, which is consistent with selection. For successful exporters, most of the productivity growth during the period occurred after entering export markets, rather than before. For unsuccessful exporters, on the other hand, this pattern is reversed. Average annual productivity growth, however, is higher prior to entry for both groups. Finally, new exporters increase sales expenditures and earn higher revenue from new products than other firms before they start exporting. This is true when compared to both non-exporters and continuous exporters.