Author : Chujian Shao
Release : 2022
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Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis Essays on International Trade and Macroeconomics by : Chujian Shao
Download or read book Essays on International Trade and Macroeconomics written by Chujian Shao. This book was released on 2022. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I focus on studying three questions about international trade including the interactions between trade and immigration, how trade liberalization influences skill upgrading decisions and the linkages between health investment and trade openness. In the first chapter, I develop a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model featuring endogenous firm entry, heterogeneous firms and endogenous labor migration to study whether trade and immigration are substitutes or complements and investigate the macroeconomic consequences of low barriers to labor mobility with emphasizing the roles of the extensive margins of production and trade in shaping immigration dynamics. First, the model predicts that trade and immigration potentially act as substitutes, which is consistent with the derivation from the Heckscher-Ohlin model of trade. Second, high-skilled labor migration makes the labor-sending country worse off due to less output and firm entry, and changes in migration costs create asymmetric welfare effects on high-skilled and low-skilled households. Third, the firm entry channel provides new insights into immigration dynamics: (i) more firm establishments demand more immigrants, and (ii) inflows of immigrants induce firm entry and result in higher labor costs in the long run. The second chapter is a joint work with Castiel Chen Zhuang and Qiliang Chen. We observe that India’s average applied effective tariff declines by about 15 percentage points and exports to the Indian market by Chinese manufacturing firms increase a lot from 2004 to 2007, but the change in the average tariff in the rest of the world is nearly zero during the same period. Motivated by this fact, we examine the impact of an Asian trade agreement, APTA, on skill upgrading by Chinese manufacturers. First, we develop a general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous export and employee training decisions to explain firm performance following trade liberalization. Second, we test the theoretical model based on general difference-in-differences estimations, showing that firms facing higher reductions in India’s tariffs increase investment in on-the-job training faster. The effects of trade openness on export participation and training spending of firms are the largest in the middle range of productivity, which is consistent to our model prediction. In the third chapter, my co-author, Qiliang Chen, and I study the interactive effects of trade openness and health investment. There is a positive correlation between trade and health outcomes, and increased exports or imports encourage more healthcare spending. However, there are only few theoretical studies addressing the questions that if trade integration is good for health and if health improvement encourages more trade. We develop a two- country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms, health capital accumulation and endogenous firm entry and labor supply to analyze what channels affect the interconnection between trade and health. Three main results emerge. First, there is positive association between trade openness and health investment. An increase in health investment boosts both the number of exporters and export values as health improvement stimulates economic growth and increases income. Trade openness increases healthcare spending and the stock of health capital because of the income and product variety effects. Second, the dynamic impacts of changes in aggregate productivity on key variables could be underestimated if workers’ health status and health investment decisions are neglected. Third, health investment could crowd out physical capital investment and new firm entrants.
