Dokument: Three Essays in International Microeconomics
| Titel: | Three Essays in International Microeconomics | |||||||
| URL für Lesezeichen: | https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=54284 | |||||||
| URN (NBN): | urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20201001-110445-4 | |||||||
| Kollektion: | Dissertationen | |||||||
| Sprache: | Englisch | |||||||
| Dokumententyp: | Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation | |||||||
| Medientyp: | Text | |||||||
| Autor: | Steffen, Nico [Autor] | |||||||
| Dateien: |
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| Beitragende: | Prof. Dr. Südekum, Jens [Gutachter] Jun.-Prof. Dr. Wrona, Jens [Gutachter] | |||||||
| Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation: | 300 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie » 330 Wirtschaft | |||||||
| Beschreibung: | The worldwide export of services and goods and its importance for world GDP has greatly increased in the past decades. A large part of this increase is due to lower trade costs, on one hand in the form of reduced tariffs. In continuation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947, for example the Uruguay Round from 1986 to 1994 came with an average reduction of ad valorem tariffs from 17
percent to 10 percent (Caliendo et al., 2017). On the other hand, transportation costs have been vastly decreasing as well, from quicker loading times and cheaper air transport costs (Hummels, 2007) to modern (tele-)communication. However, despite this long-standing major trend towards internationalization, we are still far away from full globalization. As is compellingly shown by Head and Mayer (2013), the actual level of trade openness (overall imports of goods and services relative to world GDP) is only a third compared to a hypothetical friction-less world, which suggests that significant barriers to trade remain beyond the greatly decreased transportation costs and tariffs. The general idea of more intangible trade costs that remain, like cultural and behavioral aspects, relates to the second and third chapter of this thesis, where we analyze deeply ingrained national preference structures as a potential cultural force, directly and indirectly affecting individual's behavioral decisions and actions, and how it relates to specifically trade outcomes. The first chapter also broadly considers incomplete globalization, but from a completely different perspective. There, we are considering newly arisen incentives to deliberately set up formal barriers in the form of tariffs by including environmental innovation incentives in the analysis. In a setting of rent-extracting strategic trade policy with endogenous firm investment into production technologies, this first chapter deals with environmental concerns by a government. The simple analysis reinforces the importance of investment incentives caused by tariffs in general, but shows that the resulting implications for the optimal tariff decision can be completely different between traditional tariff considerations and an environmentally conscious government. We show that an importing country in a dynamic setting with endogenous firm technology choices prefers to impose discriminatory tariffs both ex post and ex ante when emissions matter, while - as previously found in the literature (e.g. Choi, 1995) - a commitment to uniform tariffs is optimally chosen when environmental concerns do not play a role. The main contribution of this paper is to show that tariffs (and taxes) may not only become prominent again as a form of direct punishment for dirty production technologies, but that they also dynamically provide the right innovation incentives to decrease emissions globally. The second paper makes use of the Global Preference Survey (GPS) by (Falk et al., 2018) and its data of unique scope on national preference structures in patience, risk attitude, reciprocity, trust and altruism, the second chapter explores a potential influence on international trade outcomes of this broad set of economic and social preferences in a unified setting. We add to the literature on preferences' importance for aggregate outcomes and reveal distinct relationships between national preference leanings and marked differences in trade flows and relationships, both on the country-level and between bilateral partners. Our main results suggest that countries differing in their willingness to behave negatively reciprocal tend to trade significantly less amongst each other, while countries that are patient or risk-averse tend to shift towards exporting more differentiated goods as opposed to homogeneous goods and vice versa. In the third paper, we exploit a comprehensive trade panel data set that includes intra-national flows for a novel empirical strategy to identify the effect of national economic preferences - patience, risk attitude, negative reciprocity and pro-social preferences from the Global Preference Survey (GPS) - on external trade in a gravity approach, while still being able to crucially control for multilateral resistances by the proper fixed effects. We use a series of further identification approaches to compare the results and to disentangle channels for the impact of economic preferences on trade. We find that especially patience and risk aversion tend to foster external trade across the board. Additionally, we formally analyze the interaction effects of preferences and institutions. Our findings suggest that preferences may act as substitutes for bad formal institutions to some extent. | |||||||
| Lizenz: |  Urheberrechtsschutz | |||||||
| Fachbereich / Einrichtung: | Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät » Volkswirtschaftslehre | |||||||
| Dokument erstellt am: | 01.10.2020 | |||||||
| Dateien geändert am: | 01.10.2020 | |||||||
| Promotionsantrag am: | 26.02.2020 | |||||||
| Datum der Promotion: | 03.09.2020 |
