Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 38.
(refine search)
Report
The Effect of Globalization on Market Structure, Industry Evolution and Pricing
he Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute and Swiss National Bank enlisted researchers from both sides of the Atlantic for a conference focused on the determinants and dynamics of prices in a globalized economy. Increased globalization has heightened research and policy interest in external factors as drivers of inflation. Firms? pricing decisions are at the core of the analysis.
Working Paper
Trade Liberalization versus Protectionism: Dynamic Welfare Asymmetries
We investigate whether the losses from an increase in trade costs (protectionism) are equal to the gains from a symmetric decrease in trade costs (liberalization). We incorporate dynamics through capital accumulation into a standard Armington trade model and show that the welfare changes are asymmetric: Losses from protectionism are smaller than the gains from liberalization. In contrast, standard static trade models imply that the losses equal the gains. The intuition for asymmetry in our model is that, following protectionism, the economy can coast off of previously accumulated capital ...
Working Paper
Trade barriers and the relative price tradables
In this paper I quantitatively address the role of trade barriers in explaining why prices of services relative to tradables are positively correlated with levels of development across countries. I argue that trade barriers play a crucial role in shaping the cross-country pattern of specialization across many heterogenous tradable goods. The pattern of specialization feeds into cross-country productivity differences in the tradables sector and is reflected in the relative price of services. I show that the existing pattern of specialization implies that the tradables-sector productivity gap ...
Working Paper
Deindustrialization and Industry Polarization
We add to recent evidence on deindustrialization and document a new pattern: increasing industry polarization over time. We assess whether these new features of structural change can be explained by a dynamic open economy model with two primary driving forces, sector-biased productivity growth and sectoral trade integration. We calibrate the model to the same countries used to document our patterns. We find that sector-biased productivity growth is important for deindustrialization by reducing the relative price of manufacturing to services, and sectoral trade integration is important for ...
Working Paper
Price equalization does not imply free trade
In this paper we show that price equalization alone is not sufficient to establish that there are no barriers to international trade. There are many barrier combinations that deliver price equalization, but each combination implies a different volume of trade. Therefore, in order to make statements about trade barriers it is necessary to know the trade flows. We demonstrate this first theoretically in a simple two-country model. We then extend the result quantitatively to a multicountry model with two sectors. We show that for the case of capital goods trade, barriers have to be large in ...
Report
Conference on International Economics
Globalization has led to increased integration across countries in goods markets and financial markets and has changed the environment in which policy operates. As a result, researchers in the various subfields have developed new methods to study and measure the consequences of globalization. To better understand these developments, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas? Globalization Institute and the University of Houston brought together researchers from academic institutions and the Federal Reserve System for a conference focusing on international trade and prices and on international ...
Journal Article
Why was the decline in U.S. trade larger this time? a global view
The decline in U.S. trade during the Great Recession was worse than during previous recessions. But the difference was not merely due to the severity of the U.S. recession.
Journal Article
U.S. productivity growth flowing downstream
Measurements of U.S. productivity growth have declined, particularly in the high-tech sector. This may reflect increased U.S. specialization in upstream activities in the global supply chain. Those activities tend to experience slower productivity growth.
Working Paper
Structural Change and Global Trade
Services, which are less traded than goods, rose from 58 percent of world expenditure in 1970 to 79 percent in 2015. Using a Ricardian trade model incorporating endogenous structural change, we quantify how this substantial shift in consumption has affected trade. Without structural change, we find that the world trade to GDP ratio would be 15 percentage points higher by 2015, about half the boost delivered from declining trade costs. In addition, this structural change has lowered the global welfare gains from trade integration by almost 40 percent over the past four decades. Absent further ...
Working Paper
Capital goods trade and economic development
We argue that international trade in capital goods has quantitatively important effects on economic development through two channels: (i) capital formation and (ii) aggregate TFP. We embed a multi country, multi sector Ricardian model of trade into a neoclassical growth model. Barriers to trade result in a misallocation of factors both within and across countries. Our model matches several trade and development facts within a unified framework. It is consistent with the world distribution of capital goods production, cross-country differences in investment rate and price of final goods, and ...