Three Essays On Economic Effects Of Trade Costs

The effects of international economic integration on the prices the firms charge and the number of varieties available for consumption is crucial for the welfare of consumers. This dissertation is a compilation of three essays, which, using both theory and empirical analysis, study the determinants of prices and of the number of varieties available for consumption. Recent empirical work has shown that world trade is dominated by firms producing multiple products, and that a few large exporters, or superstars, account for most of a country's exports. These findings challenge traditional models of trade, in which each firm is small and produces a single product. The first two chapters of my dissertation study how the presence of multiproduct firms and superstars affects the predictions of the traditional models of trade. In chapter one, I study the effects of international integration on consumers' welfare in the presence of large multiproduct exporters. The welfare of consumers depends on how large firms choose the number of the varieties they export - their product scope. I focus on two determinants of the scope of large exporters: income effects and cannibalization effects, namely the reduction in a firm's own sales following the introduction of a new variety. Several sources of data confirm the empirical relevance of the two determinants: 1) the product scope increases with the per capita income of the destination, and 2) as evidence of cannibalization effects, there exists a hump-shaped relationship between product scope and market share of a firm. I build a model of large multiproduct firms that generates results consistent with the empirical evidence. The model features firms competing oligopolistically and consumers with non-homothetic preferences. What are the effects of international integration on the welfare of consumers? To answer to this question, I derive a new formula for the welfare gains from trade that arise in a world of large multiproduct exporters. The formula highlights the contributions of income and cannibalization effects to the welfare gains from trade. In fact, models that ignore income effects would overestimate the gains from trade, while models that ignore cannibalization effects underestimate the gains. Moreover, neglecting cannibalization effects causes a sizable underestimation of the gains from trade in more concentrated industries. A common prediction of standard models of multiproduct firms is that firm's total sales are proportional to the firm's scope. The underlying assumption is that the ability of a firm to produce efficiently a variety is proportional to its ability to introduce new varieties. In chapter two, joint with Mingzhi Xu, we document that such a prediction performs poorly in the data. Using Chinese firm-level data, we find a disconnect between sales and scope across firms within a destination: for any level of sales, there are several single product firms and wide scope firms. Moreover, firm-destination specific shocks explain more than 50% of the variation in scope across firms and destinations, and the scope of exporters conditional on sales depends on measurable characteristics of firms, such as capital intensity and R&D expenditures. We rationalize the three stylized facts in a model in which firms differ in their productivity and in their flexibility, namely the ability to introduce new varieties in a destination at low costs. The additional layer of heterogeneity has new implications for both intensive and extensive margins of trade.While the first two chapters of the dissertation study how economic integration - modeled as a reduction in trade frictions - affects the welfare of consumers, in the third chapter, I examine those trade frictions, decomposing their nature and their effects. Recent research showed that deviations from the Law of One Price are starkly smaller within a currency union. Can a reduction in trade costs within a currency union explain this fact? I answer to this question in chapter three. I apply Heckscher's insight that transaction costs create bands of inaction in which price differences are not arbitraged away. Only when price differences exceed a certain threshold does arbitrage become profitable and prices begin to converge. A simple model of international arbitrage predicts that bands of inaction between two countries increase with trade costs and decline with the countries' sizes. I use monthly disaggregated price indices from 32 European countries from 1999 to 2016 and estimate the bands of inaction for the relative prices of 43 tradable commodities, using a Threshold Autoregressive Model. Currency unions reduce trade costs: the bands of inaction between countries that are in the European Monetary Union are 17% lower than the average band.

A firm's productivity is composed of two parts: pure technical change and location-specific (agglomeration) externalities. Regional productivity is thus an aggregation of productivity of firms producing similar goods and located in a given region. International trade can affect both components of regional productivity. First, trade openness in a closed economy may alter its internal economic geography. Some regions which become more attractive to firms than before gain an advantage over others from integration into global markets. Second, as a competition pressure, trade liberalization forces the least productive firms to exit, resulting in the growth of aggregate productivity in the industry. The three essays presented in this dissertation explore the relationship between international trade and regional productivity in the presence of heterogeneous firms. In the first essay, a theoretical framework is introduced in order to describe how the above two channels, through which trade affects regional productivity, shape a country's spatial distribution of productivity. Results show that industries, each having its own cost-minimizing location, can be spatially relocated within a country via heterogeneous trade liberalization across industries. Moreover, trade intensifies localization for each industry since most firms in an industry move to or gather around their industry-specific cost- minimizing location. The consequent clustering of firms generates additional localization economies. More importantly, the intensification of localization economies can slow or delay the selection process, i.e. exit of low productivity firms, following trade liberalization. These findings suggest that trade openness induces significant industrial and spatial dynamics (entry, exit and survival) within an economy. The second and third essays are empirical tests on the second channel through which trade openness affects regional productivity using county-level data from Korea and firm-level data from India, respectively. In addition to trade liberalization, regional infrastructure is considered to be another competition pressure for domestic firms, i.e. improved infrastructure in a region induces a similar selection process among firms. These empirical essays investigate the effect of falling trade costs and improving domestic infrastructure on the regional variation of raw productivity using a common methodology. That is, a spatial econometric procedure is applied to a production function framework to estimate total factor productivity (TFP) by region and industry, while controlling for potential external and spatial effects. The mean and alternative percentiles of the regional raw productivity distribution are then specified as functions of international and domestic competition indicators. International competition is represented by trade costs, which are estimated as frictions in a gravity-type trade model, while road density is considered to capture the level of a region's infrastructure. In both Korea and India, it is found that trade costs reduction significantly shifted to the right, particularly the 10th percentile value of, the regional productivity distribution. However, a change in the level of infrastructure appears to bring about a higher change in regional productivity relative to a change in the international competition level. Therefore, the relative contribution of trade costs and infrastructure to regional productivity should be evaluated with attention to the costs underlying these options for regional development.

This thesis consists of three essays on the economic effects of agricultural and non-agricultural trade. The first essay asks whether the observed low trade intensity of agricultural goods is caused by high trade costs or small gains from agricultural trade. By empirically estimating structural equations from a trade model, I find that it is largely due to high trade costs. I also find large variation in relative efficiency of producing agricultural goods, which suggests that lower agricultural trade costs could lead to large gains from trade. The second essay asks how large are the gains from lower trade costs in the presence of the "Food Problem". I extend the Eaton-Kortum trade model to include a tradeable agriculture sector, minimum consumption and home production of agricultural goods. The calibrated model implies much larger gains from trade for poor countries than prior studies. The main reason for these gains is that intra-sectoral trade leads poor countries to specialize in a set of agricultural goods with high efficiency and inter-sectoral trade enables them to reallocate labor to manufacturing, which often is their comparative advantage sector. The third essay quantitatively evaluates the potential impact of removing China's Hukou system, which restricts rural-urban migration in China, on the world economy. I find that removing Hukou could increase China's income by 4.7%, and would substantially impact some of China's small neighboring economies. This is because removing Hukou increases the relative price of agricultural goods, which benefits net agricultural exporters such as Thailand and hurts net agricultural importers such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

This dissertation is composed of three self-contained chapters on international trade and economic development, with a special focus on the involvement of the government or public-funded sectors. The first chapter investigates international trade of higher education, specifically its impact on native students and native workers in the exporting country. Theoretically, I show that, in a general equilibrium model with non-profit publicly-subsidized higher education providers (HEPs) that care about both education quality and the enrollment of native students, serving foreign students may improve natives' access to higher education, which eventually benefits all native workers. Empirically, I find that, during the period 2001 to 2007, the enrollment of one more foreign student in an Australian university leads to the enrollment of around 0.75 more native students in this university. The impact is identified using an instrumental variable, generated from the interaction between demand for Australian higher education from different countries during the sample period and student networks these countries had in different Australian HEPs during 1989 to 1994. The second chapter studies commercial development in the presence of economic agglomeration of commercial goods and services, a result of consumers' love of varieties and transportation costs associated with commercial consumption. I show that a low-income community may be under-served with commercial goods and services because a developer cannot capture all the profits of a commercial project. A block grant to a developer can solve the market failure and generate a total profit bigger than the grant. Employment tax abatements alone are much less effective and much more costly. The third chapter examines the long-run impact of trade in higher education. In an overlapping generation (OG) model with a higher education sector composed of non-profit research institutions and for-profit teaching institutions, I show that importing teaching services benefits low-ability individuals by increased number of research workers in production, and that it may also benefit high-ability individuals by providing better training to skilled workers to complement research workers.