Journal of International Economics最新文献

By exploiting changes in the volatility of U.S. Treasury yields and foreign official (FO) flows into U.S. Treasuries after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, we identify a FO flow shock via heteroskedasticity in a structural VAR. We estimate that a $100B FO flow shock moves 5 and 10-year U.S. yields by about 100 basis points within a month. An event study of the intraday U.S. Treasury yield curve response to Japan’s FX intervention in September 2022 validates our VAR estimates. Our findings imply that a 1% reduction in the Dollar share of China’s reserves could raise long-term U.S. yields by about 20 basis points.

Capital and its sectoral allocation affect default incentives. Under general assumptions, default risk is decreasing in the total stock of capital and increasing in the share of capital allocated to non-tradable production. This implies that when competitive households make all investment decisions capital has two externalities: a capital-stock externality and a portfolio externality. These hamper the ability of a benevolent government to make optimal borrowing and default decisions and are exacerbated during periods of distress. Competitive equilibria feature underinvestment, larger non-traded sectors, more default, and lower debt and consumption than a centralized planner’s allocation.

Seaports facilitate the fast flow of goods across space, but ports also entail local costs borne by host cities. We use the introduction of containerized shipping to explore the effects of port development. At the local level, we find that seaport development increases city population by making a city more attractive, but this market access effect is offset by costs which make the city less attractive. At the aggregate level, we find that the local costs associated with port development are heterogeneous across cities and reduce aggregate welfare gains. Net of the costs, our results suggest that containerization in seaports increased world welfare by 3.4%.

Poor countries export a remarkably narrow range of products. To what extent have trade preferences targeted to the least developed countries (LDCs) changed this situation? We study a large set of recent reforms to the LDC trade preferences offered by OECD countries. Leveraging trade policy variation by importer, exporter, product and year, we show that tariff reductions have increased the prevalence of positive trade flows. However, new flows have been far more likely to emerge in cases with previous ‘export experience’, i.e. where countries already exported the same product to another OECD country, or exported a related product to the same importer. So this wave of tariff cuts for LDCs has resulted in an extension of existing patterns of trade rather than wider export diversification.

This paper investigates how firms prepare their workforce to export. We employ a novel identification strategy to isolate how a firm’s hiring decision at home responds to export opportunities that arise from exogenous changes to product demand abroad. Combining Brazilian exporter and linked employer–employee data, we show that firms act on better chances to export by hiring workers with prior experience at exporting firms. We find that firms concentrate this preparatory hiring of experts in skilled blue-collar occupations and that firms separate from the previously hired experts when the predicted export-market participation fails to materialize. The evidence is consistent with the tenet that a few exporting experts in select occupations shape a firm’s competitive advantage.

We show that the US dollar response to trade policy uncertainty (TPU) is key to assessing the impact of US trade policy. Employing structural vector autoregressive models, we find that TPU shocks supported a multilateral USD appreciation during the 2018–19 trade tensions between the US and some of its major trading partners. We rationalize this in a two-country New Keynesian model with financial frictions that links the increase in TPU to rising demand for safe USD assets. Our findings suggest that the TPU-induced appreciation of the USD in 2018–19 significantly counteracted US trade policy attempts to raise US competitiveness.

A convenience yield represents a difference between yield on a safe bond and yield on a synthetic safe bond, constructed by combining a risky bond with a CDS contract. We explain the shapes of eurozone sovereign convenience curves using a model in which arbitrageurs face higher funding costs on bonds with credit risk and bond demand shocks induce funding risk. We provide novel causal evidence for our mechanism using variation in funding costs generated through exogenous haircut category changes. Changes in convenience yields represent a key transmission channel of unconventional monetary policy to bond yields.

I present a dynamic trade model spanning many countries to explore the transitional paths of trade-induced inequality. By incorporating capital-skill complementarity, human capital accumulation, and capital accumulation, this paper examines the exact transitional path following a shift from autarky to trade. It reveals that trade increases the skill premium, skill share, and real wages for both skilled and unskilled workers in the majority of countries at the steady state. However, the short-term impact of trade on inequality is more pronounced. The exact transitional path indicates that the dynamic of trade-induced inequality is influenced by the flexibility in adjusting factor supplies during the transition at different stages, and education alleviates approximately 50% of trade-induced inequality in the long run. Furthermore, the analysis illuminates the observed patterns of skill premium in recent trade liberalization episodes in Mexico, China, and South Korea, and raises the possibility that globalization may intensify intergenerational inequality.

This paper suggests a rationale for the GATT/WTO ban on export subsidies by showing that, in a linear Cournot profit-shifting model in which countries invest in a policy infrastructure before imposing trade policy, an agreement banning export subsidies tends to be more self-enforcing than one banning tariffs. Oligopoly introduces asymmetry between import tariffs and export subsidies: terms-of-trade and profit-shifting effects run in the same direction for import tariffs but in opposite directions for export subsidies. This asymmetry and the fact that it takes time for countries to change their trade policy infrastructure imply that the payoffs on the off-equilibrium path under an import-tariff-only agreement tend to be lower than those on the off-equilibrium path under an export-subsidy-only agreement. Specifically, punishment with tariffs is harsher than punishment with subsidies. When the set of instruments is restricted to import tariffs, a trade agreement needs to neutralize both the terms-of-trade and profit-shifting externalities.

How does optimal capital-flow management change with prevailing trade policies? We study the joint optimal determination of capital controls and trade tariffs in a two-country, two-good model with trade in goods and assets. Because countries are large in both markets, a country-planner can achieve higher domestic welfare by departing from free trade in addition to levying capital controls, despite the cooperative optimal allocation being efficient. However, time variation in the optimal tariff induces households to over- or under-borrow through its effects on the path of the real exchange rate. As a result, optimal capital controls are generally smaller when trade policy is constrained (i.e., by a Free-Trade Agreement), but, absent retaliation, can be larger depending on the paths of underlying fundamentals.