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Journal Article
Global Value Chains and U.S. Economic Activity During COVID-19
We investigate the role of global value chains in the declines of manufacturing employment and output in the U.S. during COVID-19. Specifically, we identify the role of global value chains by exploiting heterogeneity across industries in cross-country sourcing patterns and its interaction with exogenous cross-country variation in the containment policies introduced to combat the virus. We find that global value chains played a significant role in the decline of output and employment across U.S. manufactures. Moreover, we find a modest impact of diversifying or renationalizing global value ...
Working Paper
Artificial Intelligence Methods for Evaluating Global Trade Flows
International trade policies remain in the spotlight given the recent rethink on the benefits of globalization by major economies. Since trade critically affects employment, production, prices and wages, understanding and predicting future patterns of trade is a high-priority for decision making within and across countries. While traditional economic models aim to be reliable predictors, we consider the possibility that Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques allow for better predictions and associations to inform policy decisions. Moreover, we outline contextual AI methods to decipher trade ...
Working Paper
Uncertainty, Shock Prices and Debt Structure: Evidence from the U.S.-China Trade War
Using the recent U.S.-China trade war as a laboratory, we show that policy uncertainty shocks have a significant impact on stock prices. This impact is less negative for firms that heavily rely on bank debt whereas non-bank debt does not have a mitigating effect. Moreover, the mitigating effect of bank debt is concentrated among zombie firms. A zombie firm that derives half of its capital from bank debt has no negative stock price reaction to increased uncertainty. These results are consistent with bank debt providing insurance for zombie firms in bad economic times.
Working Paper
Does Trade Liberalization with China Influence U.S. Elections?
This paper examines the impact of trade liberalization on U.S. Congressional elections. We find that U.S. counties subject to greater competition from China via a change in U.S. trade policy exhibit relative increases in turnout, the share of votes cast for Democrats and the probability that the county is represented by a Democrat. We find that these changes are consistent with Democrats in office being more likely than Republicans to support legislation limiting import competition or favoring economic assistance.
Working Paper
Private Information and Optimal Infant Industry Protection
We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry's cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. We use a mechanism-design approach to induce the industry to reveal its true cost. We show that (i) the optimal protection, measured by infant industry output, declines over time and is less than that under public information, (ii) the optimal protection policy is time consistent under public information but not ...
Working Paper
Tariff passthrough at the border and at the store: evidence from US trade policy
We use micro data collected at the border and at retailers to characterize the effects brought by recent changes in US trade policy ? particularly the tariffs placed on imports from China ? on importers, consumers, and exporters. We start by documenting that the tariffs were almost fully passed through to the total prices paid by importers, suggesting that the tariffs? incidence has fallen largely on the United States. Since we estimate the response of prices to exchange rates to be far more muted, the recent depreciation of the Chinese renminbi is unlikely to alter this conclusion. Next, ...
Working Paper
Oil Curse, Economic Growth and Trade Openness
An important economic paradox that frequently arises in the economic literature is that countries with abundant natural resources are poor in terms of real gross domestic product per capita. This paradox, known as the ?resource curse,? is contrary to the conventional intuition that natural resources help to improve economic growth and prosperity. Using panel data for 95 countries, this study revisits the resource curse paradox in terms of oil resource abundance for the period 1980?2017. In addition, the study examines the role of trade openness in influencing the relationship between oil ...
Working Paper
Intellectual Property, Tariffs, and International Trade Dynamics
The emergence of global value chains not only leads to a magnification of trade in intermediate inputs but also to an extensive technology diffusion among the different production units involved in arms-length relationships. In this context, the lack of enforcement of intellectual property rights has recently become a highly controversial subject of debate in the context of the China-U.S. trade negotiations. This paper analyzes the strategic interaction of tariff policies and the enforcement of intellectual property rights within a quantitative general equilibrium framework. Results indicate ...
Report
Quantitative Trade Models: Developments and Challenges
Applied general equilibrium (AGE) models, which feature multiple countries or regions, multiple sectors, and input-output linkages across sectors in a Walrasian general equilibrium framework, have been the dominant tool for evaluating the impact of trade liberalization since the 1980s. We provide an overview of the historical development of AGE models and a guide as to how they are used to perform policy analysis. We then review and document shortcomings in the performance of AGE models in predicting the sectoral effects of past trade reforms, that is, we show that AGE models often perform ...
Journal Article
Price Equalization Does Not Imply Free Trade
In this article, the authors demonstrate the possibility of price equalization in a two-country world with barriers to international trade. For price equalization to occur when the countries are asymmetric, the country with higher productivity must also be the one with the lower trade barrier. A corollary of the authors? result is that small departures from purchasing power parity do not necessarily imply that world trade is mostly integrated.