Search Results
Working Paper
Shortages of Critical Goods in a Global Economy: Optimal Trade and Industrial Policy
This paper studies optimal trade and industrial policy in response to shortages of critical goods following global shocks. We develop a dynamic open-economy model with essential and non-essential goods, heterogeneous households, and incomplete financial markets. When global demand for essential goods rises, households fail to internalize how their borrowing choices affect aggregate interest rates, leading to excessive discounting of future returns and underinvestment. Trade amplifies shortages as producers reallocate supply toward exports. Calibrated to the U.S. during COVID-19, the model ...
Discussion Paper
China’s Electric Trade
China has spent considerable government resources to develop advanced electric technology industries, such as those that produce electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar panels. These efforts have spilled over to international trade as improvements in price and quality have increased the global demand for these goods. One consequence is that passenger cars and batteries have been disproportionately large contributors to the rise in the country’s trade surplus in recent years. This has not been the case, though, for solar panels, as falling prices due to a supply glut pulled down ...
Working Paper
Shortages of Critical Goods in a Global Economy: Optimal Trade and Industrial Policy
This paper studies shortages of critical goods in a global economy and the role for policy. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of trade with producers of essential and non-essential goods owned by heterogeneous households under incomplete markets. A global increase in demand for critical goods increases prices and production, but there is underinvestment relative to an economy with a representative household or complete markets. Trade exacerbates the shock as producers reallocate domestic sales toward exports. Shortages can be mitigated, increasing welfare, by taxing exports while ...
Working Paper
Shortages of Critical Goods in a Global Economy: Optimal Trade and Industrial Policy
This paper studies the role for optimal trade and industrial policy to mitigate shortages of critical goods following global shocks. We develop a dynamic model of trade with producers of essential and non-essential goods owned by heterogeneous households under incomplete markets. Shocks that increase global demand for critical goods lead to underinvestment relative to an economy with a representative household or complete markets. Trade exacerbates the shock as producers reallocate domestic sales toward exports. Shortages can be mitigated, increasing welfare, by taxing exports while ...
Report
Who Collaborates with the Soviets? Financial Distress and Technology Transfer During the Great Depression
We provide evidence that financial distress induces firms to sell their technology to foreign competitors. To do so, we construct a novel, spatial panel dataset by individually researching and locating U.S. firms who signed Technology Transfer Agreements (TTAs) with the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s in various U.S. counties. By relating the number of TTAs signed in each county to the number of bank failures, we establish a significant, positive relationship between financial distress and the number of firms signing TTAs with the Soviet Union. Our findings suggest that banking panics ...