Search Results
Working Paper
What is Certain about Uncertainty?
Researchers, policymakers, and market participants have become increasingly focused on the effects of uncertainty and risk on financial market and economic outcomes. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the many existing measures of risk, uncertainty, and volatility. It summarizes what these measures capture, how they are constructed, and their effects, paying particular attention to large uncertainty spikes, such as those appearing concurrently with the outbreak of COVID-19. The measures are divided into three types: (1) news-based, survey- based, and econometric; (2) asset market ...
Working Paper
Why is Trade Not Free? A Revealed Preference Approach
A prominent explanation for why trade is not free is politicians’ desire to protect some of their constituents at the expense of others. In this paper we develop a methodology that can be used to reveal the welfare weights that a nation’s import tariffs implicitly place on different groups of society. Applied in the context of the United States in 2017, this method implies that redistributive trade protection accounts for a significant fraction of US tariff variation and causes large monetary transfers between US individuals, mostly driven by differences in welfare weights across sectors ...
Working Paper
Investment Responses to Trade Liberalization : Evidence from U.S. Industries and Establishments
This paper examines the effect of a change in U.S. trade policy on the domestic investment of U.S. manufacturers. Using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we find that industries more exposed to reductions in import tariff uncertainty exhibit relative declines in investment after the change in trade policy. Within industries, we find that this relationship is concentrated among establishments with low initial levels of labor productivity, capital intensity and skill intensity. For plants with high initial levels of skill intensity, we find that increased exposure is ...
Working Paper
Innovation and Trade Policy in a Globalized World
How do import tariffs and R&D subsidies help domestic firms compete globally? How do these policies affect aggregate growth and economic welfare? To answer these questions, we build a dynamic general equilibrium growth model where firm innovation endogenously determines the dynamics of technology, market leadership, and trade flows, in a world with two large open economies at different stages of development. Firms? R&D decisions are driven by (i) the defensive innovation motive, (ii) the expansionary innovation motive, and (iii) technology spillovers. The theoretical investigation illustrates ...
Working Paper
Technology, Geography, and Trade over Time: The Dynamic Effects of Changing Trade Policy
I study the dynamic effects of changes in trade policy in a multi-country model with firms that make durable and destination-specific investments in exporting capacity. Using Mexican exporter-level data, I show that incumbent exporters to minor trade partners account for a smaller share of bilateral exports than do incumbent exporters to major trade partners, indicating a systematic difference in the persistence of the export decision across destinations. The model is calibrated to capture the positive relationship between exporting persistence and export volume, and predicts that trade ...
Working Paper
The Macroeconomic Effects of Trade Policy
We study the short-run macroeconomic effects of trade policies that are equivalent in a friction-less economy, namely a uniform increase in import tariffs and export subsidies (IX), an increase in value-added taxes accompanied by a payroll tax reduction (VP), and a border adjustment of corporate pro.t taxes (BAT). Using a dynamic New Keynesian open-economy framework, we summarize conditions for exact neutrality and equivalence of these policies. Neutrality requires the real exchange rate to appreciate enough to fully offset the effects of the policies on net exports. We argue that a ...