Essays on Firm Productivity and Openness to Foreign Trade and Investment PDF Download

Author: Jens Matthias Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Author: Chujian Shao
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

Author: Toshiyasu Kato
Publisher:
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Category : East Asia
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Author: Bernardo Diaz De Astarloa
Publisher:
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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.

Author: Herbert Giersch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262071482
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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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.

Author: Franz Gehrels
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642956599
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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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.

Author:
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 101

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Author: Mari Tanaka
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The first chapter of this dissertation asks the impact of foreign trade on working conditions in developing countries. There is a long-standing debate over the impact of global trade on workers and firms in developing countries. In this chapter, I investigate the causal effect of firm exporting on working conditions and firm performance in Myanmar. This analysis draws on a new survey I conducted on Myanmar manufacturing firms from 2013 to 2015. I use the rapid opening of Myanmar to foreign trade after 2011 alongside identification strategies that exploit product, geographic and industry variations to obtain causal estimates of the impact of trade. I find that exporting has large positive impacts on working conditions in terms of improved fire safety, health-care, union recognition, and wages. Empirical results also indicate that exporting increases firm sales, employment, and management practice scores, and the likelihood of receiving a labor audit, which is typically required by foreign buyers, providing potential explanations for the positive impact of exporting on working conditions. The second chapter, coauthored with Laura Boudreau and Ryo Makioka, investigates the effects of a large accident occurred in developing country firms on their potential trade partners in developed countries. Specifically, we use the 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, which housed several exporting garment factories, to test for effects on stock prices, sales, costs, and profits of retail and apparel firms in developed countries. We measure CSR activity as participation in voluntary industry agreements established after the collapse to improve working conditions in the Bangladeshi apparel sector. Using an event study with stock prices, we find that firms' stock prices respond heterogeneously to association with the collapse by the media. Firms that experienced the most negative responses in stock prices in the first few days after the collapse agreed to participate in a CSR initiative, at which point their stock prices recovered; their quarterly performance was not significantly affected. Other firms that were initially less affected, but delayed forming a coalition, experienced a decline in their sales and profits in the quarter of the collapse. Our findings support a mechanism in which firms that are punished by stakeholders for the revelation of poor social standards in their supply chains may find that the benefits of CSR outweigh the costs. The third chapter asks whether an increase of foreign firms in developing countries facilitates workers' skill acquisition in firms. An increasing number of foreign firms have been invited to developing countries in the hope of benefiting the host countries' human capital formation. However, foreign entrants may reduce incumbent firms' monopsony power and incentive of training their workers. For evaluating the impact of foreign firm entries on incumbent firms' decisions to train workers, I use a rapid opening of Myanmar to trade and foreign direct investment, which attracted a large number of foreign investments, especially in the garment industry since 2012. Using yearly plant-level panel survey data from the garment industry from 2013 to 2015, I estimated the effects of an increase in the number of firms within 100 meters-neighborhoods of incumbent plants on changes in firm-sponsored training of workers, wage, turnover rates and employment. The results suggest that a foreign firm entry increases turnover rates and reduces the training intensity of incumbent firms.

Author: Nick Jacob
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Rushde Elahi Akbar
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In this dissertation I analyze the effect of globalization on income inequality and aggregate productivity growth. In the first two chapters I develop a theoretical model to study the effect of international trade and foreign direct investments (FDI) on income inequality. In the model firms with heterogeneous productivity levels hire homogenous workers. The central feature of the model is the rent-sharing mechanism, by which firms share part of their profits with employees. As a result, income varies across workers because more productive firms pay more to their workers. In the first chapter, I focus on the case when all countries are symmetric in their aggregate productivity levels. I find that increased openness to trade increases welfare and at the same time reduces income inequality. At the same time, policies that facilitate FDI, although increase welfare, also lead to greater inequality. I also find that technological progress can result in higher inequality. In the second chapter I extend the model to asymmetric countries, in which one country (North) has greater aggregate productivity than the other country (South). As the two countries liberalize trade, both countries would observe a reduction in inequality, although the reduction is greater in the North and the income inequality differential between the two countries decreases. A unilateral tariff reduction by the South has a similar effect, but North is better off setting lower tariff as it observes lowest inequality compare to other cases. The third chapter analyzes aggregate productivity growth in Chilean manufacturing industry during 1979-96. I first decompose the aggregate growth into three major components: the inter-industry effect, whereby aggregate productivity increases due to expansion of the most productive industries; the intra-industry effect, whereby aggregate productivity increase due to expansion of the most productive firms within an industry; the technological effect, which reflects a symmetric increase in aggregate productivity across all firms and industries. I then estimate the contribution of each of these channels to Chilean aggregate productivity growth and find that technological progress was the major factor of the rapid aggregate productivity growth in Chile, while the contribution of inter-industry and intra-industry effects was minimal.