Trade intermediaries, incomplete contracts, and the choice of export modes

The business literature suggests that exporters either use trade intermediaries or own foreign sales representations. Standard trade models are silent about this choice. We develop a model where producers differ with respect to competitive advantage and where trade intermediaries arise endogenously. Intermediaries allow producers to access a foreign market at lower fixed costs, but the lack of enforceable cross-country contracts reduces variable revenue. Producers select into different export modes along their characteristics. Relative prevalence of trade intermediation is stronger the bigger the risk of expropriation in the foreign country and the lower the severity of contractual frictions, the degree of heterogeneity amongst producers, and the elasticity of substitution between varieties. The volume of bilateral trade and the stock of FDI appear as complements in the model. Tentative empirical evidence confirms the main predictions. --International trade,trade intermediation,heterogeneous firms,incomplete contracts

Trade intermediation and the organization of exporters

The business literature and recent descriptive evidence show that exporting firms typically require the help of foreign trade intermediaries or need to set up own foreign wholesale affiliates. In contrast, conventional trade theory models assume that producers can directly access foreign consumers. This paper introduces intermediaries in an international trade model where producers differ with respect to productivity as well as regarding their varieties' perceived quality and tradability. We assume that trade intermediation is prone to frictions due to the absence of enforceable cross-country contracts while own wholesale subsidiaries require capital investment. We derive the sorting pattern of firms according to their degree of competitive advantage and show how the relative prevalence of intermediation depends on the degree of heterogeneity among producers, on the importance of market-specificity of goods, or on expropriation risk. We use US export data for 50 sectors and 133 destination countries to check the empirical validity of this predictions and find robust empirical support. --Trade intermediation,international trade, heterogeneous firms,incomplete contracts

Can International Migration Ever Be Made a Pareto Improvement?

We argue that compensating losers is more difficult for immigration than for trade and capital movements. While a tax-cum-subsidy mechanism allows the government to turn the gains from trade into a Pareto improvement, the same is not true for the so-called immigration surplus, if the redistributive mechanism is not allowed to discriminate against migrants. We discuss policy conclusions to be drawn from this fundamental asymmetry between migration and other forms of globalization.Gravity model, international trade, international migration, cross-country income regression

Immigration and native welfare

We unify two approaches towards identifying native welfare effects of immigration, one emphasizing the immigration surplus (Borjas, 1995,1999), the other identifying a welfare loss due to terms-of-trade effects (Davis & Weinstein, 2002). We decompose the native welfare effect of immigration into the standard complementarity effect, augmented by a Stolper-Samuelson effect, and a terms-of-trade effect. Using a structural model with three skill-classes we derive propositions on the wage and native welfare effects of various immigration scenarios. A calibration-based simulation reveals that the size of the inflow and immigrant income repatriation are key determinants of the welfare-ranking of different immigration scenarios.international migration; factor movements; international trade; non-tradable goods; welfare analysis; wages; general equilibrium; terms-of-trade

Embodied technical change in a two-sector AK model

In this paper, we study a two-sector version of the AK model proposed by Rebelo (1991), where constant returns to capital are confined to the investment goods sector. We show that this setup, an endogenous growth extension to the model of Greenwood, Hercowitz, and Krusell (1997), reproduces important features of the U.S. NIPA data, namely the secular downward trend of the price of equipment investment relative to non- durable consumption and the increasing ratio of real equipment investment to real output. The main difference to the one-sector AK model lies in the existence of obsolescence costs, which decrease output growth if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is larger than the saving rate.subliminal extant Smith economagic gmm

Exploring the Intensive and Extensive Margins of World Trade

World trade evolves at two margins. Where a bilateral trading relationship already exists it may increase through time (intensive margin). But trade may also increase if a trading bilateral relationship is newly established between countries that have not traded with each other in the past (extensive margin). We provide an empirical dissection of post-World-War-II growth in manufacturing world trade along these two margins. We propose a “corner-solutions-version” of the gravity model to explain movements on both margins. A Tobit estimation of this model resolves the so-called “distance-puzzle”. It also finds more convincing evidence than recent literature that WTO-membership enhances trade.bilateral trade, globalization, globalisation, gravity model

Export Credit Guarantees and Export Performance:An Empirical Analysis for Germany

Recent literature finds that exporters are particularly vulnerable to financial market frictions.As a consequence, exports may be lower than their efficient levels. For this reason,many countries support exporters by underwriting export credit guarantees. The empiricalevidence on the effects of those policies is, however, very limited. In this paper, we usesectoral data on export credit guarantees issued by the German government. We investigatewhether those guarantees indeed do increase exports, and whether they remedy the exportrestrictingeffect of credit market imperfections both on the sectoral and on the exportmarket levels. Exploiting the sectoral structure of a rich three-ways panel data set ofGerman exports, we control for unobserved heterogeneity on the country-year, sectoryear,and country-sector dimensions. We document a robust export-increasing effect ofguarantees. There is some evidence that the effect is larger for export markets with poorfinancial institutions and in sectors that rely more on external finance.Financial development, credit constraints, gravity equation, financial crisis.

Endogenous Skill Formation and the Source Country Effects of International Labor Market Integration

With endogenous skills and given technology, labor market integration necessarily lowers welfare of the left-behind in a poor sending country, even if all agents face identical emigration probabilities. This is in sharp contrast to the case of exogenous skill supply.labor market integration, migration, endogenous skill formation

WTO Membership and the Extensive Margin of World Trade: New Evidence

Recent literature has argued that, contrary to the results of a seminal paper by Rose (2004), WTO membership does promote bilateral trade, at least for developed economies and if membership includes non-formal compliance. We review the literature in order to identify open issues. We then develop the simplest possible "corner-solutions" version of the gravity model which serves as a framework to readdress these issues. We focus on the extensive margin of trade that separates positive-trade from zero-trade country pairs. We argue that the model can be consistently estimated using Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood methods with exporter and importer fixed effects. We account for coding issues and the potential heterogeneity of the WTO membership which recent contributions have stressed. While we find that WTO membership increases the likelihood that a given country pair trades, we do not find that the extensive margin has a strong and systematic effect on the average trade-creating potential of the WTO. JEL classifcation: F12, F13gravity approach, WTO, monopolistic competition, real trade costs