Three essays in international trade.
详细信息
- 作者：Cherkashin ; Ivan.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2010
- 导师：Krishna, Kala,eadvisor
- 毕业院校：The Pennsylvania State University
- ISBN：9781124352336
- CBH：3436052
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：3227314
- Pages：139
文摘
CHAPTER 1: The Great Russian Devaluation and Labor Demand. Does a greater degree of integration into world markets lead to a more elastic demand for labor? Often referred to as the Rodrik hypothesis, this question, despite being important from both theoretical and applied policy standpoints, is still not satisfactorily answered. Several studies that examine data for different countries, periods and aggregation levels, have failed to draw uniform conclusions. Likely reasons for this fact include poor and aggregated data, a lack of large enough shocks in tariffs, an inability to separate the effect of trade from that of other reforms, and the absence of rich sets of predictions from models. In this paper, I avoid these concerns by using a unique firm-level panel data set for several thousand manufacturing firms in Russia during a period of significant and rapid currency devaluation. This event made imports of final and intermediate goods more expensive while making Russian exports less expensive and acted like a tariff on imports and/or a subsidy on exports. In a simple, but yet revealing model, I specify the implications of a devaluation for the labor demand and derive a set of testable predictions. I then use the data and reduced form regressions to test the essence of these predictions and show that trade barriers affect labor demand elasticities. In particular, I find that a 25--30% drop in the conditional labor demand elasticity can be safely attributed to the devaluation. CHAPTER 2 with Svetlana Demidova, Hiau Looi Kee and Kala Krishna): Firm Heterogeneity and Costly Trade: A New Estimation Strategy and Policy Experiments. This paper models and estimates the responses of firms who differ in their productivity and face firm and market specific demand shocks) to trade policies in different product and export destinations. The paper does three things. First, it builds a tractable partial equilibrium model in the spirit of Melitz 2003), which incorporates both of these dimensions of heterogeneity and is well-suited for empirical work. Second, it shows how to use this model to estimate the structural parameters of interest using only cross-sectional data. Third, it uses the model to perform counterfactual experiments regarding the effects of reducing costs, both fixed and marginal, or of trade preferences with distortionary Rules of Origin) offered by an importing country. We find both have a catalytic effect which greatly increases exports to all markets. Our counterfactuals make a case for "trade as aid," as such polices can create a win-win scenario for all parties concerned and are less subject to the usual worries regarding the efficacy of direct foreign aid. CHAPTER 3 with Svetlana Demidova, Kala Krishna and Susumu Imai): The Inside Scoop: Acceptance and Rejection at the Journal of International Economics. There is little work on the inner workings of journals. What factors seem to affect the ability to publish in a journal? Could simple rules which are already used by some journals) like the immediate rejection of a significant minority of papers, help to streamline the process? At what cost? How well do journals seem to do in choosing papers? What can we say about the extent of type 1 and type 2 errors? Do editors seem to have uniform standards or are some harsher than others? We use data on submissions to the Journal of International Economics to help answer these questions.