The Impact of Trade Liberalization on Productivity Within and Across Industries: Theory and Evidence

Numerous studies have investigated the link between trade policy and firm productivity. Despite justifying firm level analysis on the basis of considerable heterogeneity between firms within narrowly defined industries, these studies typically constrain all firms to have the same expected response to changes in trade policy. In this paper we develop a theoretical model that accounts for the existence of firm level heterogeneity within industries and predicts that the equilibrium response to changes in trade policy will also be heterogeneous in terms of both sign and size. The variation in firm level reaction is shown to be determined by both firm and industry characteristics and therefore the equilibrium response to trade policy is predicted to vary not only within industries but also across industries. These results allow us to use both sources of variation in the data. We examine these predictions on a firm level data set for the Colombian manufacturing sector in the 1980’s and find strong support for them.tariffs, technology diffusion, productivity.

Leapfrogging: Time of Entry and Firm Productivity

We develop a model in which ex ante identical firms make endogenous entry and technology adoption decisions. We show that this model is capable of matching the stylized facts in which entry and adoption are dispersed over time and that, in many industries, it is the newest firms which are the most likely to exhibit high productivity growth and adopt new innovations (i.e., leapfrogging). We then derive the characteristics of those industries where such leapfrogging is likely to occur and show that leapfrogging can induce reverse preemption (i.e., forward-looking incumbent firms delaying entry and adoption due to leapfrogging behavior). As an application, we demonstrate how, in an industry conducive to leapfrogging, research subsidies can actually reduce short-run consumer welfare by discouraging firms from entering the market with a basic technology

Where the Girls Are: Trade and Labor Market Segregation in Colombia

Gary Becker's theory of discrimination argues that increasing competition will reduce discrimination in the labor market. We use the Colombian trade liberalization episode over the period 1984–91 to investigate this claim on plant-level data in three ways. First, we examine whether women are concentrated in exporting plants. Second, we examine whether the increase in foreign competition due to unilateral trade liberalization disproportionately drove discriminating plants out of the market. Finally, we investigate whether trade liberalization affected hiring decisions (and thus gender segregation) by Colombian firms.discrimination, trade, competition

Trade Liberalization and Pollution Havens

U.S. Presidential Executive Order 13141 commits the United States to a "careful assessment and consideration of the environmental impacts of trade agreements." The most direct mechanism through which trade liberalization would affect environmental quality in the U.S. is through changes in the composition of industries. Freer trade means greater specialization, increasing the concentration of polluting industries in some countries and decreasing it in others. Indeed, in this paper we predict a substantial reduction in U.S. pollution from 1972-94 due entirely to a shift in the composition of U.S. manufacturing toward cleaner industries. We then use annual industry-level data on imports to the U.S. to examine whether this compositional shift can be traced to the significant trade liberalization that occurred over the same time period; we conclude that no such connection exists. First, we find that a shift toward cleaner industries, similar to that observed in U.S. manufacturing, has also occurred among U.S. imports. Second, we find no evidence that pollution-intensive industries have been disproportionately affected by the tariff changes over that time period.

Is Environmental Policy a Secondary Trade Barrier? An Empirical Analysis

Should international trade agreements be extended to include negotiations over environmental policy? The answer depends on whether countries distort levels of environmental regulations as a secondary means of providing protection to domestic industries; our results suggest that they do. Previous studies of this relationship have treated the level of environmental regulation as exogenous, and found a negligible correlation between environmental regulation and trade flows. In contrast, we find that, when the level of environmental regulation is modeled as an endogenous variable, its estimated effect on trade flows is significantly higher than previously reported.

Infant Industry Protection and Industrial Dynamics

A perennial case for industrial policy is based on the protection of young or emerging industries. Despite a natural association with concepts of life cycles, industrial policy has not been analyzed in the context of an industry life-cycle model. In particular, an important life-cycle characteristic, the potential for very large changes in the rate of net entry, is ignored. In this paper, we demonstrate how the impact of industrial policy depends critically on the entry and exit dynamics within an industry. In particular, we construct a model of technology adoption in which the number of firms is endogenous, and derive a set of novel predictions about the effects of protection on firm technology decisions. Specifically, we show that permanent protection can induce earlier adoption, but also decreases the probability that a given firm adopts the new technology. Likewise, we demonstrate that reducing the duration of protection results in faster adoption than permanent protection, but also reduces a given firms probability of adoption. Finally, we show that, for industries characterized by flexibility in firm numbers, protection does not change the rate of technology adoption but does increase the size and probability of a shakeout (large scale net exit)

The Short and Long-Run Effects of International Environmental Agreements on Trade

Does the ratification of an international environmental agreement (IEA) reduce a country’s competitiveness on world markets? In this paper, we take a gravity regression approach to answering this question by using industry-level bilateral trade data and employing time-varying country fixed effects to control for the endogeneity of treaty participation. We find that ratifying an IEA has significant (albeit small) negative effects on the exports of a country’s median manufacturing industry as well as a compositional shift towards exporting cleaner goods. However, we also show that this negative competitive effect on the median manufacturing industry disappears in the long-run. In fact, the positive compositional shift becomes stronger in the long-run as a ratifying country sees a further decline in exports of dirtier industries which is more than compensated for by an increase in exports of cleaner industries, with an overall positive but negligible effect on employment

Economic Growth and the Diffusion of Clean Technologies: Explaining Environmental Kuznets Curves

Production often causes pollution as a by-product. Once environmental degradation becomes too severe, regulation is introduced by which society forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production processes. We model this transition as a change in general purpose technology" and investigate how it interferes with economic growth driven by quality-improvements. The model gives an explanation for the inverted U-shaped pollution-income relation found in empirical research for many pollutants (Environmental Kuznets Curve). We provide an analytical foundation for the claim that the rise and decline of pollution can be explained by policy-induced technology shifts and intrasectoral changes