Unemployment and relative labor market institutions between trading partners

This paper contributes to the literature that highlights the role of trading partners' institutions for a country's unemployment rate. The objective is to study whether the results established in the minimum wage-setting of Davis (1998) hold when unemployment is driven by search frictions. This paper finds that relative labor market institutions matter for equilibrium unemployment as they generate comparative advantages, but there are two main differences with Davis. With North-North trade, unemployment decreases in the low-regulation country. When South is brought into the picture, low-regulation North is not insulated, and unemployment increases in both developed countries as a result of specialization.     

Offshoring and unemployment: The role of search frictions labor mobility

In a two-sector, general-equilibrium model with labor-market search frictions, we find that the wage increases and sectoral unemployment decreases upon offshoring in the presence of perfect intersectoral labor mobility. If, as a result, labor moves to the sector with the lower (or equal) vacancy costs, there is an unambiguous decrease in economywide unemployment. With imperfect intersectoral labor mobility, unemployment in the offshoring sector can rise, with an unambiguous unemployment reduction in the non-offshoring sector. Imperfect labor mobility can result in a mixed equilibrium in which only some firms offshore, with unemployment in the offshoring sector rising.     

International transmission of transitory and persistent monetary shocks under imperfect information

We analyze the transmission of monetary shocks in a new open-economy macroeconomics model with one-period nominal contracts and imperfect information. Shocks may have transitory and persistent components that can be disentangled only through the accumulation of information over time. As a consequence, the responses to shocks are significantly altered compared with the case of full information. There are persistent effects on international relative prices, and delayed exchange-rate overshooting is possible following a persistent shock. In some cases, there are (ex post) excess returns as a positive interest rate spread is accompanied by an appreciating currency (or vice versa). Lastly, it is demonstrated that staggering reinforces persistence.     

International trade and unemployment: Theory and cross-national evidence

We present a model of trade and search-induced unemployment, where trade results from Heckscher-Ohlin (H-O) and/or Ricardian comparative advantage. Using cross-country data on trade policy, unemployment, and various controls, and controlling for endogeneity and measurement-error problems, we find fairly strong and robust evidence for the Ricardian prediction that unemployment and trade openness are negatively related. This effect dominates the positive H-O effect of trade openness on unemployment for capital-abundant countries, which turns negative for labor-abundant countries. Using panel data, we find an unemployment-increasing short-run impact of trade liberalization, followed by an unemployment-reducing effect leading to the new steady state.     

The dynamics of trade and competition

We estimate a version of the Melitz and Ottaviano [Melitz, Marc J. and Ottaviano, Gianmarco I.P., 2008, Market size, trade, and productivity, Review of Economic Studies 75(1), pp. 295-316.] model of international trade with firm heterogeneity. The model is constructed to yield testable implications for the dynamics of prices, productivity and markups as functions of openness to trade at a sectoral level. The theory lends itself naturally to a difference in differences estimation, with international differences in trade openness at the sector level reflecting international differences in the competitive structure of markets. Predictions are derived for the effects of both domestic and foreign openness on each economy. Using disaggregated data for EU manufacturing over the period 1989-1999 we find short run evidence that trade openness exerts a competitive effect, with prices and markups falling and productivity rising. The response of profit margins to openness has implications on the conduct of monetary policy. Consistent with the predictions of some recent theoretical models we find some, albeit weaker, support that the long run effects are more ambiguous and may even be anti-competitive. Domestic trade liberalization also appears to induce pro-competitive effects on overseas markets.     

Terms of trade risk with partial labor mobility

We examine the welfare consequences of terms-of-trade risk in a small open economy in which it is costly for workers to move between sectors. Relocation costs lead to partial labor mobility, sectoral wage gaps and income risk exceeding that of an economy in which relocation is costless. Using observed wage differentials and standard values for volatility and preferences, we find that the welfare cost of partial labor mobility alone is unlikely to be very large, even in the absence of self-insurance arrangements. In addition, modest consumption substitution elasticities significantly reduce these welfare costs.     

International trade in durable goods: Understanding volatility, cyclicality, and elasticities

Data for OECD countries document: 1. imports and exports are about three times as volatile as GDP; 2. imports and exports are pro-cyclical, and positively correlated with each other; 3. net exports are counter-cyclical. Standard models fail to replicate the behavior of imports and exports, though they can match net exports relatively well. Inspired by the fact that a large fraction of international trade is in durable goods, we propose a two-country two-sector model in which durable goods are traded across countries. Our model can match the business cycle statistics on the volatility and comovement of the imports and exports relatively well. The model is able to match many dimensions of the data, which suggests that trade in durable goods may be an important element in open-economy macro models.     

International real business cycles with endogenous markup variability

The aggregate impact of decisions made at the level of the individual firm has recently attracted a lot of attention in both the macro and trade literatures. We adapt the benchmark international real business cycle model to a game-theoretic environment to add a channel for the strategic interaction among domestic and foreign firms. We show how the sum of strategic pricing decisions made at the level of the individual firm can have significant effects on the volatility and cross country co-movement of GDP and its components. Specifically we show that the addition of this one channel for strategic interaction leads to a significant increase in the cross-country co-movement of production and investment, as well as a significant decrease in the volatility of investment and the trade balance over the benchmark IRBC model.     

Fluctuations in the foreign exchange market: How important are monetary policy shocks?

We study the effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks on the bilateral exchange rate between the U.S. and each of the G7 countries. We also estimate deviations from uncovered interest rate parity conditional on these shocks. The analysis is based on a structural vector autoregression in which monetary policy shocks are identified through the conditional heteroscedasticity of the structural disturbances. Unlike earlier work in this area, our empirical methodology avoids making arbitrary assumptions about the relevant policy indicator or transmission mechanism in order to achieve identification. At the same time, it allows us to assess the implications of imposing invalid identifying restrictions. Our results indicate that the nominal exchange rate exhibits delayed overshooting in response to a monetary expansion, depreciating for roughly ten months before starting to appreciate. The shock also leads to large and persistent departures from uncovered interest rate parity. Variance-decomposition results indicate that monetary policy shocks account for a non-trivial proportion of exchange rate fluctuations.     

Habit formation and the present-value model of the current account: Yet another suspect

In a recent paper, Gruber (Gruber, J.W., 2004. A present value test of habits and the current account. Journal of Monetary Economics 51, 1495-1507) claims that habit formation in consumption plays an important role in current account fluctuations in selected developed countries, extending the present-value model of the current account (PVM) with consumption habits. In this paper, however, I show that the habit-forming PVM is observationally equivalent to the PVM augmented with persistent transitory consumption, which is induced by world real interest rate shocks. Based on a small open-economy real business cycle (SOE-RBC) model endowed with consumption habits as well as persistent world real interest rate shocks, this paper resolves the inherent identification problem of the habit-forming PVM by Bayesian methods to seek effects of habit formation on current account fluctuations in typical small open economies, Canada and the United Kingdom. Results reveal no clear evidence that habit formation plays a crucial role in current account fluctuations.     

International trade and child labor: Cross-country evidence

We explore the relationship between exposure to trade (as measured by openness) and child labor in a cross-country setting. Our methodology accounts for the fact that trade flows are endogenous to child labor (and labor standards more generally) by examining the relationship between child labor and variation in trade based on geography. We find that countries that trade more have less child labor. At the cross-country means, the data suggest an openness elasticity of child labor of − 0.7. For low-income countries, the elasticity of child labor with respect to trade with high-income countries is − 0.9. However, these relationships appear to be largely attributable to the positive association between trade and income. We consistently find a small and statistically insignificant association between openness and child labor when we control for cross-country income differences in the full sample, when we split the sample into different country groups, consider only trade between high- and low-income countries, or focus on exports of unskilled-labor intensive products from low-income countries. Thus, the cross-country data do not substantiate assertions that trade per se plays a significant role in perpetuating the high levels of child labor that pervade low-income countries.     

Valuation effects and the dynamics of net external assets

‘Valuation effects’ can imply that the traditional current account is an inaccurate measure of the change in the net foreign asset (NFA) position. This paper uses new developments in the analysis of portfolio choice in general equilibrium to investigate valuation effects in a two-country model. Broadly speaking, the valuation effects in the model correspond to those observed in the data. But there is a key distinction between ‘unanticipated’ and ‘anticipated’ valuation effects. Unanticipated effects can be large, dominating the movement in NFA, but anticipated effects arise only at higher orders of approximation and are small for reasonable parameterizations.     

Emerging market fluctuations: What makes the difference?

Aggregate fluctuations in emerging countries are different from those in developed countries. Using data from Mexico and Canada, this paper decomposes these differences in terms of reduced form shocks that affect aggregate efficiency and distort the decisions of households about how much to invest, consume, and work in a standard model of a small open economy. The decomposition exercise suggests that most of these differences are explained by fluctuations in aggregate efficiency, distortions in labor choices over the business cycle, and distortions in intertemporal consumption choices. Successful models for emerging markets fluctuations should include primitive shocks and frictions that generate these features. Models with financial frictions in the form of working capital constraints, possibly augmented with endogenous collateral constraints, are consistent with these findings.     

The present-value model of the current account has been rejected: Round up the usual suspects

Tests of the present-value model (PVM) of the current account are frequently rejected by data. Standard explanations rely on the “usual suspects” of non-separable preferences, fiscal policy and world real interest rate shocks, external imperfect international capital mobility, and an internalized risk premium. We confirm these rejections on post-war Canadian data, then investigate their source by calibrating and simulating alternative versions of a small open economy, real business cycle model (RBC). Bayesian Monte Carlo experiments reveal that a “canonical” RBC model is close to the data, but far from the PVM predictions. Although each suspect matters in some way, none improve the fit to the data. However, the PVM restrictions are reproduced when the internalized risk premium is introduced into the canonical model. By adding the exogenous world real interest rate shock to this version of the model, it matches the data better and is moved closer to the PVM predictions. This suggests that there is an important common world component to current account fluctuations, which points to additional underlying macroeconomic factors that drive the current account.     

On the international transmission of technology shocks

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series and an aggregate of industrialized countries, we find that technology shocks appreciate the terms of trade and lower the trade balance; they induce an ‘S’-shaped cross-correlation function for both variables (the S-curve). In calibrating a prototypical international business cycle model under complete and incomplete financial markets, we find two distinct sets of parameter values. While both model specifications deliver the S-curve, the underlying transmission mechanism of technology shocks is fundamentally different. Most importantly, only in the incomplete markets economy the terms of trade appreciate and thus amplify the relative wealth effects of technology shocks—as suggested by the evidence.     

International capital flows under dispersed private information

It is well established that private information is critical to our understanding of asset prices. In this paper we argue that it also affects international capital flows and use a simple two-country DSGE model to illustrate its impact. We show that private information (i) increases the volatility of both net and gross capital flows, (ii) leads to a high correlation between capital inflows and outflows, (iii) leads to a disconnect of capital flows from observed macro fundamentals and (iv) implies that capital flows contain information about the future macro fundamentals. We also show that dispersed information affects capital flows both through asset prices and directly, so that the impact on flows is not just the mirror image of the impact on prices.     

Trade and industrial location with heterogeneous labor

It is shown in the context of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogeneous trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-regional trade. Labor heterogeneity gives local monopsony power to firms but also introduces variations in the quality of the job match. Matches are likely to be better when there are more firms and workers in the local market, giving rise to an agglomeration force which can offset the forces against, trade costs and the erosion of monopsony power. A robust agglomeration equilibrium is derived analytically and its properties illustrated with numerical simulations.     

Trade, wages, and the political economy of trade protection: evidence from the Colombian trade reforms

Worker industry affiliation plays a crucial role in how trade policy affects wages in many trade models. Yet, most research has focused on how trade policy affects wages by altering the economy-wide returns to a specific worker characteristic (i.e., skill or education) rather than through worker industry affiliation. This paper exploits drastic trade liberalizations in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s to investigate the relationship between protection and industry wage premiums. We relate wage premiums to trade policy in an empirical framework that accounts for the political economy of trade protection. Accounting for time-invariant political economy factors is critical. When we do not control for unobserved time-invariant industry characteristics, we find that workers in protected sectors earn less than workers with similar observable characteristics in unprotected sectors. Allowing for industry fixed effects reverses the result: trade protection increases relative wages. This positive relationship persists when we instrument for tariff changes. Our results are in line with short- and medium-run models of trade where labor is immobile across sectors or, alternatively, with the existence of industry rents that are reduced by trade liberalization. In the context of the current debate on the rising income inequality in developing countries, our findings point to a source of disparity beyond the well-documented rise in the economy-wide skill premium: because tariff reductions were proportionately larger in sectors employing a high fraction of less-skilled workers, the decrease in the wage premiums in these sectors affected such workers disproportionately.     

Labor demand and trade reform in Latin America

Trade liberalization is thought to result in higher own-wage elasticities of labor demand, particularly for unskilled labor, with adverse implications for both labor market volatility and wage dispersion. The paper first argues that theoretically the link between liberalization and labor-demand elasticities is less clear than has previously been asserted. It then uses dynamic panel techniques to estimate labor-demand relations for manufacturing establishments in Chile, Colombia, and Mexico across periods of trade policy reform. The results do not strongly support the hypothesis that trade liberalization has a direct impact on own-wage elasticities.     

How do fiscal and technology shocks affect real exchange rates?: New evidence for the United States

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series relative to an aggregate of industrialized countries, this paper provides new evidence on the dynamic effects of government spending and technology shocks on the real exchange rate and the terms of trade. To achieve identification, we derive robust restrictions on the sign of several impulse responses from a two-country general equilibrium model. We find that both the real exchange rate and the terms of trade—whose responses are left unrestricted—depreciate in response to expansionary government spending shocks and appreciate in response to positive technology shocks.