Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of EconomicsSteven P. Cassou, Wayne NafzigerThis dissertation comprises three essays in open economy and international macroeconomics. The first essay investigates the propagation mechanism of real exchange rate shocks to key real sectors that constitute U.S. foreign trade. The analysis is carried out by decomposing the U.S. trade balance into agriculture, manufacturing and services and evaluating how these sectors respond through the monetary policy channel to a shock in the real exchange rate. A VAR model is constructed using quarterly data of the U.S. foreign trade from 1976Q2 to 2005Q1. The results show that a shock to the real exchange rate has a greater impact on manufacturing and services net trade relative to agriculture. Moreover, the results also indicate, at the sectoral level, that exports are more sensitive to the real exchange rate shocks than are imports. These results are important to researchers using dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models of small open economies because they show transmission features of real exchange rate and monetary policy disturbances to key sectoral components of exports, imports and the trade balance.
The second essay employs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework to an open economy setting in order to investigate the mechanism through which the key sectors of agriculture, manufacturing and services are affected by shocks in the real exchange rates. The essay investigates exchange rate movements as deviations from purchasing power parity, disregarding the changes in the prices of non-tradable goods relative to tradable goods among countries. The results suggest that exchange rate movements are a function of structural parameters that constitute the three sectors of agriculture, manufacturing and services such as labor shares and the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods.
The third essay examines the key forces driving innovation among entrepreneurs of ICT (information and communications technology) firms within Bangalore, India’s leading software city. The essay employs the multinomial logistic technique on qualitative variables related to education, social strata, experience, and diaspora of Indian software entrepreneurs to show empirically their relevance in explaining Schumpeterian innovation in the Indian software industry. This study not only looks at the impact of years of schooling on innovation, but also the types of education received by an entrepreneur, such as technical or commercial type of education, whether the last degree was received from India or from abroad and whether the entrepreneur attended the Indian Institute of Technology. The empirical results indicate that, the level of education, in terms of number of years of schooling and types of education received by an Indian software entrepreneur are statistically significant in explaining innovation in the Indian software industry. The results also show that, more years of experience in the software industry by an entrepreneur, increases the probability that they become innovators and reduces the likelihood of imitation. Moreover, the likelihood of adaptation is invariant to years of experience in the industry.
We also investigate whether exposure to foreign technology increases the likelihood of innovation in the industry by examining three types of diaspora networks, that is, living abroad, working abroad and being a CEO abroad at least 6 months before establishing a software company in India. The results suggest that this foreign exposure increases the likelihood of innovation and reduces imitation and adaptation. Among studies of Indian entrepreneurs examining caste, this study is unique in that caste has no statistical significance in explaining entrepreneurship
