Journal of International Economics最新文献

China’s rapid export growth has spurred extensive research investigating its effects on other economies. The exact causes of the boom as well as the slowdown in Chinese exporting after 2007 are less well-understood. We quantify the drivers of Chinese export growth using a general equilibrium model estimated with detailed trade and production data that capture rich heterogeneity across destinations, firm ownership types, production locations, and sectors. We find that the three key drivers of Chinese export growth overall are rising foreign demand, improvements in access to imported intermediates, and factor productivity growth within China. Weakening foreign demand and a lack of further improvements in imported inputs access largely explain the slowdown in exporting after 2007. Furthermore, important differences especially across sectors and firms of different ownership types caution against any single narrative.

A trend-cycle BVAR decomposition investigates the role of different slow-moving trends – i.e., globalization, expectations, automation, labor demand and supply – in shaping the slow-moving dynamics of trend inflation. Despite well-anchored expectations, slow-moving imported “cost-push” factors induced disinflationary pressure keeping trend inflation below target. The cycle block provides evidence of inflation volatility increasingly driven by international factors. These results can explain why, from 2000 in the U.S. and before the recent surge, inflation remained both below target and silent to domestic slack.

We introduce heterogeneity between workers and entrepreneurs in a standard Fisherian model to study Sudden Stop dynamics and optimal policy. The distinction between workers and entrepreneurs introduces a redistributive motive that meaningfully interacts with Fisherian deflation. While in tranquil times redistribution is driven by the relative marginal utilities of consumption, the planner additionally favors entrepreneurs during Sudden Stops to mitigate Fisherian deflation. We show how heterogeneity adds to the understanding of how ex ante and ex post policies can be best designed to alleviate the negative effects of Sudden Stops.

We revisit the occurrence of self-fulfilling crises in sovereign debt markets under time-varying interest rates and growth in Eaton and Gersovitz (1981)’s model. We show that, when long-term interest rates exceed growth, insolvency is solely caused by the exhaustion of the sovereign’s debt repayment capacity subject to limited commitment. Indeed, high interest rates impose discipline on market sentiments, because creditors necessarily become more optimistic about solvency when the sovereign reduces debt exposure. Creditors’ beliefs respond instead ambiguously under low interest rates fluctuating around growth. As long as interest rates exceed growth, debt reduction alleviates the fiscal burden. However, the sovereign also benefits from the prospect of rolling over outstanding debt as long as interest rates remain below growth. Thus, creditors’ sentiments might adjust adversely to fiscal consolidation. When the default punishment is not disproportionately severe, this mechanism sustains belief-driven debt crises even when fundamentals would otherwise ensure solvency.

Using linked employer–employee data for Germany, we provide evidence for job polarisation between firms and identify offshoring as an important determinant of these employment changes. To accommodate these findings, we set up a model in which offshoring to a low-wage country can lead to job polarisation in the high-wage country due to a reallocation of labour across firms that differ in productivity and pay wages that are positively linked to their profits. Offshoring is chosen only by the most productive firms, and only for those tasks with the lowest variable offshoring costs. A reduction in those variable costs increases offshoring at the intensive and at the extensive margin. Well in line with our evidence, this causes domestic employment shifts from the newly offshoring firms in the middle of the productivity distribution to firms at the tails of this distribution, paying either very low or very high wages.

We document that plants belonging to small and mid-sized firms are geographically concentrated, while large firms are much more dispersed. These differences are sizable; firms with 2 plants have a dispersion that is 5 log points lower than predicted by industry location patterns, while the corresponding figure is less than 2 log points for firms with 40 plants and less than a half log point for firms with 100 or more plants. These patterns are qualitatively robust across industries, time periods, and alternative specifications. We also find that plants that are farther from the firm headquarters employ less workers than closer plants within the same firm, and that this relationship is attenuated in large firms. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of plant location in which more productive firms endogenously choose to lower their cost of geographic expansion.

We uncover evidence that the US–China trade war was consequential for voting outcomes in the 2018 congressional midterm election. Republican House candidates lost support in counties more exposed to tariff retaliation, but saw no appreciable gains in counties that received more direct US tariff protection. The electoral losses were only modestly mitigated by the US agricultural subsidies announced in summer 2018. Republicans also fared worse in counties that had seen recent gains in health insurance coverage (where efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act may have been more consequential), and where a new federal cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions disadvantaged more taxpayers. Counterfactual calculations suggest that Republicans would have lost ten fewer House seats absent the trade war, in a similar range to either health care or SALT policies in the number of lost seats it can account for.

Over the past two decades, emerging market economies have improved their liability structures by increasing the share of their debt denominated in local currency. This paper introduces a local currency debt (i.e., in units of aggregate consumption) into a sudden stop model and explores how this alternative structure sheds new perspectives on financial regulations. Decentralized agents do not internalize the effects of their portfolio decisions on financial amplification and undervalue the insurance benefit of using local currency debt. However, due to debt-deflation incentives and the cost of buying insurance, a discretionary planner is reluctant to issue local currency debts, and capital controls are primarily used to restrict credit volumes. In contrast, a social planner with commitment would promise a higher future payoff to obtain a more favorable bond price. The capital control under commitment encourages borrowing in local currency, mitigates the severity of crises, and improves welfare relative to laissez-faire.

We study the financial spillovers of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to local suppliers through a trade credit channel and a bank loan channel. Using rich Chinese firm-level data, we provide robust evidence that a high concentration of FDI in downstream industries substantially reduces domestic suppliers' trade credit provision and improves their access to bank loans, especially unsecured loans. A variety of empirical strategies suggest that the effects are causal. Furthermore, the beneficial bank loan effect is more pronounced for local suppliers facing more severe information frictions. We also use supplier-customer links to provide additional evidence for FDI's financial spillovers.

We estimate the short- and long-run local labor market impacts of the large increase in U.S. imports and exports that occurred over the 1970s. We exploit the sequential opening of overseas shipping container ports over the period, which generated export and import shocks that were largely non-overlapping across U.S. labor markets thereby providing substantial variation to distinguish their effects. We find that the average net impact on the employment-to-population ratio was positive and concentrated in the initial decade, with little longer-run impact. At the same time, in-migration due to the export shock greatly exceeded out-migration due to the import shock. We show that these different migration responses were largely due to asymmetry in the housing supply curve. The largest gains accrued to residents of labor markets that simultaneously experienced a relatively large export shock, had a relatively low housing supply elasticity, and had a relatively high home-ownership rate.