Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 25.
(refine search)
Working Paper
Trade wedges, inventories, and international business cycles
The large, persistent fluctuations in international trade that cannot be explained in standard models by changes in expenditures and relative prices are often attributed to trade wedges. We show that these trade wedges can reflect the decisions of importers to change their inventory holdings. We find that a two-country model of international business cycles with an inventory management decision can generate trade flows and wedges consistent with the data. Moreover, matching trade flows alters the international transmission of business cycles. Specifically, real net exports become ...
Working Paper
Violating purchasing power parity.
This paper demonstrates that deviations from the law of one price are an important source of violations of absolute PPP across countries. Using highly disaggregated U.S. export data, we document evidence of systematic international price discrimination based on the local wage of consumers in the destination market. We show that most violations from absolute PPP can also be explained by international differences in wages. We find very little additional explanation is due to differences in income per capita. Developing and calibrating a model of pricing-to-market based on search frictions and ...
Working Paper
The great trade collapse of 2008-2009: an inventory adjustment?
This paper examines the role of inventories in the decline of production, trade, and expenditures in the US in the economic crisis of late 2008 and 2009. Empirically, the authors show that international trade declined more drastically than trade-weighted production or absorption and there was a sizeable inventory adjustment. This is most clearly evident for autos, the industry with the largest drop in trade. However, relative to the magnitude of the US downturn, these movements in trade are quite typical. The authors develop a two-country general equilibrium model with endogenous inventory ...
Working Paper
Trade Policy is Real News: Theory and Evidence
We evaluate the aggregate effects of changes in trade barriers when these changes can be implemented slowly over time and trade responds gradually to changes in trade barriers because firm-level trade costs make exporting a dynamic decision. Our model shows how expectations of changes in trade barriers affect the economy. We find that while decreases in trade barriers increase economic activity, expectations of lower future trade barriers temporarily decrease investment, hours worked, and output. Further- more, canceling an expected decline in future trade barriers raises investment and ...
Working Paper
Do sunk costs of exporting matter for net export dynamics?
Not all firms export every period. Firms enter and exit foreign markets. Previous research has suggested that these export participation decisions have significant aggregate implications. In particular, it has been argued that these export decisions are important for the comovements of net exports and the real exchange rate. In this paper, the authors evaluate these predictions in a general equilibrium environment. Specifically, assuming that firms face an up-front, sunk cost of entering foreign markets and a smaller period-by-period continuation cost, they derive the discrete entry and exit ...
Journal Article
Why are goods so cheap in some countries?
Looking around the world, we observe substantial differences across countries in prices for most goods. These price differences also tend to be positively correlated with income differences, so that citizens of high-income countries tend to pay more for the same goods than citizens in low-income countries. In ?Why Are Goods So Cheap in Some Countries?,? George Alessandria and Joseph Kaboski summarize some of the evidence related to the big price differences across countries for a broad set of goods. They then discuss the relationship between prices and income levels and some possible ...
Working Paper
Pricing-to-market and the failure of absolute PPP
The authors show that deviations from the law of one price in tradable goods are an important source of violations of absolute PPP across countries. Using highly disaggregated export data, they document systematic international price discrimination: at the U.S. dock, U.S. exporters ship the same good to low-income countries at lower prices. This pricing-to-market is about twice as important as any local non-traded inputs, such as distribution costs, in explaining the differences in tradable prices across countries. The authors propose a model of consumer search that generates ...
Working Paper
U.S. trade and inventory dynamics
The authors examine the source of the large fall and rebound in U.S. trade in the recent recession. While trade fell and rebounded more than expenditures or production of traded goods, they find that relative to the magnitude of the downturn, these trade fluctuations were in line with those in previous business cycle fluctuations. The authors argue that the high volatility of trade is attributed to more severe inventory management considerations of firms involved in international trade. They present empirical evidence for autos as well as at the aggregate level that the adjustment of ...
Working Paper
Trade adjustment dynamics and the welfare gains from trade
We build a micro-founded two-country dynamic general equilibrium model in which trade responds more to a cut in tariffs in the long run than in the short run. The model introduces a time element to the fixed-variable cost trade-off in a heterogeneous producer trade model. Thus, the dynamics of aggregate trade adjustment arise from producer-level decisions to invest in lowering their future variable export costs. The model is calibrated to match salient features of new exporter growth and provides a new estimate of the exporting technology. At the micro level, we find that new exporters ...
Journal Article
The great trade collapse (and recovery)
The collapse and rebound in U.S. international trade from 2008 to 2010 was quite stunning. Over this period, the fluctuations in international trade were bigger than the fluctuations in either production of or expenditures on traded goods. These relatively large fluctuations in international trade were surprising to some, since international trade had been growing at a very fast pace for quite a long time. They were equally surprising for trade theorists, since these movements in trade arise in standard models of international trade only when the costs of international trade rise and fall ...