Search Results
Report
Global imbalances and structural change in the United States
Since the early 1990s, as the United States has borrowed from the rest of the world, employment in U.S. goods-producing sectors has fallen. Using a dynamic general equilibrium model, we find that rapid productivity growth in goods production, not U.S. borrowing, has been the most important driver of the decline in goods-sector employment. As the United States repays its debt, its trade balance will reverse, but goods-sector employment will continue to fall. A sudden stop in foreign lending in 2015?2016 would cause a sharp trade balance reversal and painful reallocation across sectors, but ...
Report
Using the new products margin to predict the industry-level impact of trade reform
This paper develops a methodology for predicting the impact of trade liberalization on exports by industry (3-digit ISIC) based on the pre-liberalization distribution of exports by product (5-digit SITC). Using the results of Kehoe and Ruhl (2013) that much of the growth in trade after trade liberalization is in products that are traded very little or not at all, we predict that industries with a higher share of exports generated by least traded products will experience more growth. Using our methodology, we develop predictions for industry-level changes in trade for the United States and ...
Report
Modeling great depressions: the depression in Finland in the 1990s
This paper is a primer on the great depressions methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999, 2007) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007). We use growth accounting and simple dynamic general equilibrium models to study the depression that occurred in Finland in the early 1990s. We find that the sharp drop in real GDP over the period 1990?93 was driven by a combination of a drop in total factor productivity (TFP) during 1990?92 and of increases in taxes on labor and consumption and increases in government consumption during 1989?94, which drove down hours worked in Finland. We attempt to ...
Journal Article
Modeling great depressions: the depression in Finland in the 1990s
This article is a primer on the great depressions methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999, 2007) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007). We use growth accounting and simple dynamic general equilibrium models to study the depression that occurred in Finland in the early 1990s. We find that the sharp drop in real GDP over the period 1990?93 was driven by a combination of a drop in total factor productivity (TFP) during 1990?92 and of increases in taxes on labor and consumption and increases in government consumption during 1989?94, which drove down hours worked in Finland. We attempt to ...
Working Paper
Firm Entry and Exit and Aggregate Growth
Applying the Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (FHK) (2001) decomposition to plant-level manufacturing data from Chile and Korea, we find that the entry and exit of plants account for a larger fraction of aggregate productivity growth during periods of fast GDP growth. Studies of other countries confirm this empirical relationship. To analyze this relationship, we develop a simple model of firm entry and exit based on Hopenhayn (1992) in which there are analytical expressions for the FHK decomposition. When we introduce reforms that reduce entry costs or reduce barriers to technology adoption ...
Report
How important is the new goods margin in international trade?
We propose a methodology for studying changes in bilateral trade due to countries exporting goods that they did not export previously or exported only in small quantities. Applying this methodology to country pairs that undergo trade liberalization and to pairs in which one of the countries undergoes significant structural transformation, we find large increases on this extensive?or new goods?margin. Looking at country pairs with no major trade policy change or structural change, however, we find little or no increases on the extensive margin. Studying time series on trade by commodity, we ...
Report
The Opportunity Costs of Entrepreneurs in International Trade
We show that a trade model with an exogenous set of heterogeneous firms with fixed operating costs has the same aggregate outcomes as a span-of-control model. Fixed costs in the heterogeneous-firm model are entrepreneurs' forgone wage in the span-of-control model.
Discussion Paper
What will happen when foreigners stop lending to the United States?
Since the early 1990s, the United States has borrowed heavily from its trading partners. This paper presents an analysis of the impact of an end to this borrowing, an end that could occur suddenly or gradually.
Report
Are shocks to the terms of trade shocks to productivity?
International trade is frequently thought of as a production technology in which the inputs are> exports and the outputs are imports. Exports are transformed into imports at the rate of the price> of exports relative to the price of imports: the reciprocal of the terms of trade. Cast this way, a> change in the terms of trade acts as a productivity shock. Or does it? In this paper, we show that> this line of reasoning cannot work in standard models. Starting with a simple model and then> generalizing, we show that changes in the terms of trade have no first-order effect on> productivity when ...
Report
Sudden stops, sectoral reallocations, and the real exchange rate
A sudden stop of capital flows into a developing country tends to be followed by a rapid switch from trade deficits to surpluses, a depreciation of the real exchange rate, and decreases in output and total factor productivity. Substantial reallocation takes place from the nontraded sector to the traded sector. We construct a multisector growth model, calibrate it to the Mexican economy, and use it to analyze Mexico's 1994?95 crisis. When subjected to a sudden stop, the model accounts for the trade balance reversal and the real exchange rate depreciation, but it cannot account for the ...