December 14th, 2011
If you’re keen on development, check out the series of guest posts by job-market candidates at the World Bank’s Development Impact blog. Here’s UC Berkeley’s Teferi Mergo describing his paper on the effects of international migration on source households:
Although international migration can yield large benefits to individual migrants from poor countries, the net impact of migration on the source countries is unclear… In my job market paper, I add to the literature by focusing on migrants from an extremely poor country – Ethiopia – who are randomly assigned the possibility of migration through the United States’ Diversity Visa lottery. My analysis is based on a specially designed survey (which I conducted) of households of previous DV lottery winners and lottery participants in Addis Ababa…
I was able to get only a complete listing of lottery winners… It is not possible to obtain a comparable list of DV lottery applicants from which to identify lottery losers. Fortunately… around 50% of Addis’ households are conservatively estimated to have played the lottery at one time or another, thus allowing me to draw a representative sample of the control group from the city…
The study finds that having a family member win the lottery and migrate has significant positive effects on several dimensions of the remaining family’s standard of living. Families of DV migrants spend about 30% more on food, are thus better fed and have higher body mass indexes. Moreover, families of winners possess more and better quality consumer durables, which include personal computers, modern cooking stoves, household furniture and home entertainment appliances. Having a family member who won the DV lottery also gives families access to improved sources of drinking water and sanitation facilities. Winners’ families, however, have about the same savings and physical capital accumulation as other families. Most of the positive effects of emigration appear to be on the consumption side of the family budget…
A final interesting conclusion is that participants in the DV lottery (both winners and losers) have substantially higher outcomes than non-participants, suggesting that Ethiopian DV migrants are indeed positively selected. Non-participants have lower food spending, lower variety and value of durables they own, and less access to clean drinking water and convenient sanitation facilities. They are also the least likely to use banking facilities and save. Interestingly, however, lottery non-participants spend more on leisure activities.
Wow, that bears repeating: “Around 50% of Addis’ households are conservatively estimated to have played the [US green card] lottery.”
Posted in Immigration | 1 Comment »
December 13th, 2011
Alan Beattie has a long(ish) summary of the Doha round’s dim prospects in the FT. It begins: ”If Charles Dickens wanted a bleak setting for a rewrite of A Christmas Carol, his classic tale of regret and redemption, he could do worse than the World Trade Organisation.”
Here’s a tidbit that caught my eye:
Bernard Hoekman, director of the World Bank’s international trade department, told a seminar in Washington last week that the bank and others had overhyped the round. When it came to sharing blame, he said, “I can point to myself and my organisation.” The bank produced ambitious estimates of how Doha could boost economic growth and reduce poverty. “Those became a focal point for expectations, and expectations were overblown.”
Posted in WTO Negotiations | 1 Comment »
December 5th, 2011
Some highlights from this evening’s discussion of the Doha negotiations at Columbia University:
- On why it’s called the DDA: “I was facing down a half-dozen trade ministers who said, ‘I stood in my parliament and said there’d be no new trade round.’ So I said, ‘it’s not a trade round; it’s a development agenda’. [:::pffffffttt:::] It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t show up in many textbooks that gets the process going.” – Mike Moore
- On Doha’s prospects: “I must say, I have never heard Pascal Lamy more grim than this evening.” – Merit Janow
- “If Doha goes, no one is ever going have a multilateral round again.” – Jagdish Bhagwati
[My transcriptions are closer to quotations than paraphrasing, but these are not verbatim.]
Also on Doha, don’t miss this Alan Beattie tweet.
Posted in WTO Negotiations | No Comments »
November 28th, 2011
Tim Lee, writing for Ars Technica, describes a Silicon Valley startup aiming to facilitate the creation of more Silicon Valley startups by improving labor mobility:
Blueseed plans to buy a ship and turn it into a floating incubator anchored in international waters off the coast of California…
Immigration law makes it difficult for many would-be immigrants to get permission to work in the United States. For example, there’s an annual cap on the number of H1-B visas available for American employers to hire skilled immigrant workers. However, permission to travel to the United States for business or tourism is much easier to get.
Marty pointed to the B-1 business visa as a key part of his company’s strategy. With a B-1 visa, visitors can freely travel to the United States for meetings, conferences, and even training seminars. B-1 visas are relatively easy to get, and can be valid for as long as 10 years.
Blueseed plans to provide regular ferry service between the ship to the United States. While Blueseed residents would need to do their actual work—such as writing code—on the ship, Marty envisions them making regular trips to Silicon Valley to meet with clients, investors, and business partners…
Blueseed’s business model seems like a long shot. Buying, outfitting, staffing, and filling a 1,000-person ship seems like a tall order for even the most talented three-person team.
Posted in Labor | No Comments »
November 21st, 2011
There are plenty of trade economists on the job market this year. I’ve pulled together an incomplete list of JMPs, like last year. As usual, I focus on trade papers, thereby neglecting international finance and open-economy macro papers and trade economists working in other fields (such as urban). Please add more in the comments.
- Nikolas J Zolas (UC Davis): “Firm Locational Patenting Decisions“
- Nan Zhang (Virginia): “Productivity and Labor Market Effects of Offshoring to Low-Wage Countries“
- Yiqing Xie (Boulder): “Exporting, Licensing, FDI and Productivity Choice: Theory and Evidence from Chilean Data“
- Anna Wong (Chicago): “Measuring Trade Barriers: An Application to China’s Domestic Trade“
- Tao Wang (Princeton): “Kyoto Protocol and the Patterns of International Trade“
- Mehmet Fatih Ulu (Chicago): “Heterogeneity and Uncertainty in Firm Selection into Foreign Markets“
- Martin Tobal (UCSD): “A Model Of Employment And Wage Impacts Of Service Offshoring“
- Olga Timoshenko (Yale): “Product Switching in a Model of Learning“
- Lucas Threinen (Chicago): “The Dynamic Response to Trade Policy“
- Michael J. Sposi (Iowa): “Evolving Comparative Advantage, Structural Change, and the Composition of Trade“
- Adam Storeygard (Brown): “Farther on down the road: Transport costs, trade and urban growth in sub-Saharan Africa“
- Wei Shi (UCLA): “A model of the technology adoption decision for heterogeneous firms“
- Huimin Shi (Ohio State): “Gravity or Distorted Gravity: Evidence from Chinese Data“
- Liugang Sheng (UC Davis): “ The Ownership Structure of Offshoring and Wage Inequality: Theory and Evidence from China“
- Gisela Rua (Berkeley): “Fixed Costs, Network Effects, and the International Diffusion of Containerization
- Dorothée Rouzet (Harvard): “ Improving “National Brands”: Reputation for Quality and Export Promotion Policies“
- Gina Pieters (Minnesota): “Trade and Within-Country Consumption Inequality“
- Megha Mukim (LSE): “Does exporting increase productivity? Evidence from India“
- Madhura Maitra (Columbia): “Unexceptional Exporter Performance in China? Role of Processing Trade“
- April Xiangjun Ma (Virginia): “Do Taxes Influence the Organizational Boundaries of International Firms? An Income-Shifting Channel through Transfer Pricing“
- Gary Lyn (PSU): “Marshallian Externalities, Comparative Advantage and International Trade“
- William Lincoln (Michigan): “Entry Costs and Increasing Trade“
- Donghyun (Don) Lee (Oregon): “Cross-Border Mergers and Acquisitions with Heterogeneous Firms: Technology vs. Market Motives“
- Paul Landefeld (Virginia): “Task Trade, Wages, and Transportation Costs“
- Illenin O. Kondo (Minnesota): “Trade Reforms, Foreign Competition, and Labor Market Adjustments in the U.S.“
- Nune Hovhannisyan (Boulder): “Technology Gap and International Knowledge Transfer: New Evidence from the Operations of Multinational Corporations“
- David Hémous (Harvard):”Environmental Policy and Directed Technical Change in a Global Economy: Is There a Case for Carbon Tariffs?“
- Rachita Gullapalli (Berkeley): “Does Foreign Portfolio Investment Help In Bad Times? Firm-Level Evidence from the Asian Financial Crisis“
- Daniel Gomez Gaviria (Chicago Booth): “Mergers and Heterogeneous Firms: Trade, asset reallocation and productivity “
- Teresa Fort (Maryland): “Breaking up is hard to do: Why firms fragment production across locations“
- Michael Fabinger (Harvard): “Trade and Interdependence in a Spatially Complex World“
- David DeRemer (Columbia): “The Evolution of International Subsidy Rules“
- F. Banu Demir (Oxford): “Trading Tasks and Quality“
- Hyo-Youn Chu (Boston U): “ Investments in Response to Trade Policy: The Case of Japanese Firms during Voluntary Export Restraints“
- Moonjung Choi (Virginia): “ Export Prices and Relative Location of Exporting Countries“
- Kristy Buzard (UCSD): “Trade Agreements, Lobbying and Separation of Powers“
- Wyatt Brooks (Minnesota): “Credit Market Frictions and Trade Liberalization“
- Cagatay Bircan (Michigan): “Optimal Degree of Foreign Ownership Under Uncertainty“
- Treb Allen (Yale): “Information Frictions and Trade“
Tags: job market
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
November 21st, 2011
Plenty of trade-related material in this morning’s NBER email:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
November 20th, 2011
A new Chicago Booth website polls expert economists on public policy issues. It recently asked people to strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with the following statement:
Federal mandates that government purchases should be “buy American” unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, have a significant positive impact on U.S. manufacturing employment.
Here are two responses that caught my eye:
The aggregate outcomes were:
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November 19th, 2011
This nifty note by Bajona, Gibson, Kehoe, and Ruhl points out that there may be little connection between real GDP and welfare; in fact, welfare-improving trade liberalization may lower measured real GDP. Here’s a simple example in the Heckscher-Ohlin setting:
The intuition behind the decrease in measured real GDP for the autarky to free trade scenario is simple: given factor endowments, the base-year production pattern in country i is the optimal production pattern for country i at the base year prices among all feasible production plans… Any deviation from that production pattern will lower the value of production at those prices.
Posted in Measures, Statistics & Technicalities, Theory | No Comments »
November 18th, 2011
The WTO’s World Trade Report 2012 will focus on non-tariff barriers. Of course, NTBs are nothing new, but they’re more relevant in a low-tariff world. Their relative opaqueness makes them more difficult to negotiate, discipline, and study. The WTO invites submissions of short articles for their discussion forum, though I have no idea about the scope for influencing the report (due out in July).
Posted in Non-Tariff Barriers, WTO | No Comments »
November 17th, 2011
The Economist on Exports to Mars: “The world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook… Either the current-account deficits of countries such as America are being understated or the surpluses of countries like China are being overstated, and by a rising amount… Indeed, the global “surplus” now exceeds China’s.”
Posted in Measures, Statistics & Technicalities | No Comments »
