Essays on International Trade and Business Cycles

Essays on International Trade and Business Cycles
Author: Daisoon Kim
Publisher:
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

This research investigates how international trade and business cycles vary with characteristics of industries. The first chapter documents cost side industry heterogeneity across narrowly defined industries. The second and third chapters study the short run (international business cycle) and long run (home market effect) phenomenon, respectively. The research contributes to a better understanding of how the supply side industry heterogeneity plays a vital role in international trade and macroeconomics. The first chapter provides a method to estimate the cost structure. The approach relies on cost minimization and free entry condition with frictions, which allows decomposing sources of economies of scale into a sloping marginal cost curve and fixed cost. The US manufacturing industry data show that industry-level economies of scale are more strongly associated with marginal costs than fixed costs. The second chapter shows that the industry's international business cycle patterns vary systemically by the slopes. In industries with decreasing marginal costs, output, imports, and exports are all more correlated with aggregate GDP than in industries with increasing marginal costs. To rationalize the observed patterns, this chapter introduces sloping marginal cost curves and their variations across industries in an open economy macroeconomic model. It delivers endogenous export gains/losses and within-firm links between domestic and export markets which generate two attractive features of the model: (i) it raises model-implied cross-country aggregate GDP comovements which are close to the data, and (ii) it reproduces observed industrial international business cycle patterns. The results suggest that sloping marginal cost curves and their heterogeneity are informative to understand the international business cycle. The third chapter studies how industry characteristics determine the home market effect: the impact of country size on trade surplus and the location of industries. This chapter constructs a two-country multi-industry new trade model that allows for various supply- and demand-side industry characteristics. A novel feature of the model is that economies of scale arise not just from fixed costs, but also from sloping marginal cost curves. The model predicts that large countries have a higher concentration of industries in which (i) marginal costs are an important source of economies of scale, and (ii) products are more differentiated. This chapter tests these theoretical predictions using a gravity-based specification and introduces instrumental variables to fix measurement error and proxy problems. The empirical results are consistent with the main predictions of the model. The results show that the primary building blocks of new trade theory, economies of scale and product differentiation, are central to understanding international trade patterns in narrowly defined industries. The research supposes that a non-linear cost function and variations in cost structure across industries improve our understanding of international trade and business cycles.

Essays on International Business Cycles

Essays on International Business Cycles
Author: Keita Oikawa
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN: 9781339065748

In this dissertation, I present three essays on international business cycles. In the first essay, I document the empirical regularities of international business cycles using the OECD Quarterly Data, and review the existing literatures in this field. By checking the data, I point out 1) net exports-output ratios both in nominal and real terms are countercyclical before 1990 for most of the OECD countries, 2) but the ratios changes their signs from negative to positive after 1990 for some of the countries, and 3) the main reason for the sign changes is that there are changes in the relationship between exports and output: exports were weakly correlated with output or were lagged with output before 1990, but exports become strongly correlated with output and also coincident. In the literature review part, I suggest that many of the properties of international real business cycles can be accounted for by benchmark international real business cycle models, such as Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (1992) and subsequent literatures, but those models cannot account for the coexistence of procyclical and countercyclical net exports. Further, incorporating Bansal and Yaron (2004)-style multi-factor productivity with short-run (trend-stationary transitory) shocks and long-run (difference-stationary growth) shocks are promising in order to account for the new observation about the trade variables. In the second essay, I document that the correlation between net exports and output has not always been negative after 1960. For the G6 countries, most of the countries experienced countercyclical net exports before 1990. However, some of these countries, including Germany and Japan, experienced procyclical net exports after 1990 even though they experienced countercyclical net exports before that. I also show that a simple one-good two-country business cycle model with a multi-factor productivity process can explain the phenomena. A positive transitory shocks to productivity leads to a positive response in net exports because its consumption risk-sharing effect, which causes a international resource flow from Home to Foreign country, is larger than its efficiency effect, which causes an increase in investments in Home country by importing goods form Foreign country. On the other hand, a positive growth shocks to productivity lead to a negative response in net exports because its consumption risk-sharing effect is smaller than its efficiency effect. I estimate the stochastic productivity processes for the G6 countries by using the simulated method of moments, and the simulation results of the model based on the estimated parameters are able to account for the changes in net export dynamics from pre-1990 to post-1990 for Germany and Japan. In the third essay, I document that there are changes in the correlations about trade variables and capital flows for the G7 countries: 1) the magnitude of the contemporaneous correlation of exports with output is a half of that of imports with output for pre-1990, but the former is almost the same value as the latter for post-1990, 2) the magnitude of the contemporaneous correlation of real net exports-output ratio with output is significantly negative for pre-1990, but it becomes almost zero or weakly positive for post-1990. I present two types of two-country two-good real business cycle models, one of which is with complete financial markets and the other one is with incomplete financial markets model in a sense that only risk-free one-period bonds are traded. I also add two types of shocks, transitory and growth shocks, to these two models in the spirit of Aguiar and Gopinath (2007). Firstly, the standard complete financial markets model has a strong correlation of exports with output and a weak correlation of imports with output. Secondly, the standard incomplete financial markets model has a weak correlation of exports with output and a strong correlation of imports with output. Finally, with reasonable changes in model parameter values, both the complete and incomplete market models can account for the two empirical regularities above, but only the incomplete market model can account for the empirical regularities for pre-1990. I evaluate these models in light of cross-country correlation properties based on actual data, especially the cross-country consumption correlation anomaly. I show that the incomplete financial markets model is still better than the complete market model because the cross-country consumption correlation in the incomplete financial markets model is still larger than but closer to the cross-country output correlation compared with the case of the complete financial markets model.

Global Business Cycles

Global Business Cycles
Author: Mr.Ayhan Kose
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 51
Release: 2008-06-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1451870019

This paper analyzes the evolution of the degree of global cyclical interdependence over the period 1960-2005. We categorize the 106 countries in our sample into three groups-industrial countries, emerging markets, and other developing economies. Using a dynamic factor model, we then decompose macroeconomic fluctuations in key macroeconomic aggregates-output, consumption, and investment-into different factors. These are: (i) a global factor, which picks up fluctuations that are common across all variables and countries; (ii) three group-specific factors, which capture fluctuations that are common to all variables and all countries within each group of countries; (iii) country factors, which are common across all aggregates in a given country; and (iv) idiosyncratic factors specific to each time series. Our main result is that, during the period of globalization (1985-2005), there has been some convergence of business cycle fluctuations among the group of industrial economies and among the group of emerging market economies. Surprisingly, there has been a concomitant decline in the relative importance of the global factor. In other words, there is evidence of business cycle convergence within each of these two groups of countries but divergence (or decoupling) between them.

Essays on International Macroeconomics and Trade

Essays on International Macroeconomics and Trade
Author: Paul Ko
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter introduces the global business cycle synchronization and empirically explores relationships between various shocks and the cross-country business cycle co-movement. The second chapter provides a multi-country, international real business cycle model that incorporates a comprehensive set of shocks that are mentioned in the first chapter. Then, the third chapter connects the model to the data and discusses how various shocks are backed out, by matching various data moments with the endogenous outcomes of the model. Then, the chapter answers the question of which set of shocks primarily affect the synchronization of cross-country business cycles. The fourth chapter explores the implications of the results in the previous chapters to the trade co-movement puzzle. In the first chapter, I empirically show that international business cycles have become highly synchronized across countries in the past three decades. Then, I document that there is a lack of consensus on whether this is due to an increase in the correlation of country-specific shocks or due to increased economic integration in the previous literature. In the second chapter, to understand this empirical phenomenon, I develop a multi-country real business cycle model with international trade that captures several potential explanations: shocks to productivity, demand, leisure, investment, sectoral expenditures, and trade-linkages. The third chapter describes the accounting procedure and the main results. In the first portion of the third chapter, I show a detailed accounting procedure: I match the data exactly with the endogenous outcomes of the model so that shocks fully account for the data. The data moments that I match are GDP, consumption expenditure, labor hours, PPI, CPI, and bilateral trade shares. Then, I calibrate the model to a panel of developed (G7) countries and the rest of the world (ROW). In the second portion of the third chapter, I discuss the main findings. During 1992--2014, I find that trade-linkage shocks, which capture increased economic integration and the volatility of bilateral trade flows, are essential in synchronizing international business cycles. In contrast, correlated country-specific shocks play relatively minor roles. This suggests that trade shocks due to economic integration have been the primary driver of the co-movement of international business cycles. Furthermore, I find that the sources of variation in trade-linkage shocks is predominantly driven by the rest of the world, followed by the United States and Germany -- which shows that the larger the presence of a country in global trade, the larger the impact of the country on international business cycle co-movement. In the fourth chapter, I use my model to address the \textit{trade co-movement puzzle}, which states that international real business cycle models should be predicting a much stronger positive link between trade and cross-country GDP correlations. When I do not account for the trade-linkage shocks in my counterfactuals, I find that the model does not exhibit positive relationship between trade and business cycle co-movement. On the other hand, the other sets of shocks are not sufficient enough to explain the positive relationship between trade and cross-country business cycles. This finding suggests that incorporating the dynamics of trade shocks is crucial when studying the trade co-movement puzzle.