Essays In international trade and labor markets
Name
958146816-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
15.24 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4c787a399ea4d93c95df416b24fee0a5
Author(s)
Rodrigues Adão, Rodrigo
Advisor(s)
Arnaud Costinot and Daron Acemoglu.
Date Issued
2016
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This thesis develops empirical methodologies to investigate the effect of globalization on welfare and inequality both between- and within-countries. The first essay proposes a Roy-like model where workers are heterogeneous ill terms of their comparative and absolute advantage. We show that the schedules of comparative and absolute advantage (i) determine changes in the average and the variance of the log-wage distribution, and (ii) are nonparamnetrically identified from the cross-regional variation in the sectoral responses of employment and wages to observable sector-level demand shifters. Applying these results, we find that the rise in world commodity prices accounts for 5-10% of the fall in Brazilian wage inequality between 1991 and 2010. The second essay develops a methodology to construct nonparametric counterfactual predictions, free of functional-form restrictions on preferences and technology, in neoclassical models of international trade. First, we establish the equivalence between such models and reduced exchange models in which countries directly exchange factor services. This equivalence implies that, for an arbitrary change in trade costs, counterfactual changes in factor prices, and welfare only depend on the shape of a reduced factor demand system. Second, we provide sufficient conditions for the nionparainetric identification of this system. Together, these results offer a strict generalization of the parametric approach used in so-called gravity models. Finally, we use China's recent integration into the world economy to illustrate tile feasibility of our approach. The third essay investigates the connection between the recent rise in services trade and changes in labor market outcomes in different countries. We develop a theoretical framework where trade in services arises from the spatial unbundling of workers' task output. Transmission costs endogenously determine the magnitude of between-sector task trade both within a country ("outsourcing") and between countries ("offshoring"). We show that, while differentials in sectoral task prices decrease in response to outsourcing, they increase in response to offshoring. The heterogeneity in the composition of workers' task endowments controls responses in between- and within-sector wage inequality across countries.
Description
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2016.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-213).
Subjects
Economics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Terms of Use
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