0000000000195025
AUTHOR
Philip Sauré
When Stolper-Samuelson Does Not Apply: International Trade and Female Labor
Whenever a country specializes on industries that use female labor intensively, its female labor force participation should increase. This intuition, which bases on the Stolper-Samuleson Theorem, may fail in a three-factor, two-good model. We develop a model where capital, male and female work are distinct factors of production. We follow an established assumption and postulate that capital accumulation closes the gender wage gap. In this setup, the Stolper-Samuleson based intuition fails necessarily: the gender wage gap widens in countries that specialize on sectors intensive in female labor, and vice versa.
Repatriation of Debt in the Euro Crisis: Evidence for the Secondary Market Theory
The Euro Crisis has marked a sharp inversion in the process of the European financial integration and, more specifically, a repatriation of countries' debt from foreign to domestic investors. Yet the drivers of the financial fragmentation remain unclear. This paper investigates the empirical patterns in light of competing theories of cross-border portfolio allocation. Three main empirical regularities stand out: i) the repatriation of debt occurred primarily in crisis countries; ii) the repatriation affected mainly public debt; iii) the public debt of crisis countries was reallocated to politically influential countries within the Euro Area. Standard theories of portfolio allocation and hom…
Current Account Adjustment and Retained Earnings
This paper develops a formal strategy to calculate current accounts with retained earnings (RE) on equity investment and analyzes their adjustment during the global financial crisis. RE are the part of companies' profits which are reinvested and not distributed to shareholders as dividends. International statistical standards treat RE on foreign direct investment and RE on portfolio investment differently: while the former enter the current and financial account, the latter do not. We show that this differential treatment strongly affects current accounts of several advanced economies, frequently referred to as financial centers, with large positions in equity (portfolio) investment. Our em…
Overreporting Oil Reserves
An increasing number of oil market experts argue that OPEC members substantially overstate their oil reserves. While the economic implications could be dire, the incentives for overreporting remain unclear. This paper analyzes these incentives, showing that oil exporting countries may overreport to raise expected future supply, discourage oil-substituting R&D, and hence improve their future market conditions. Overreporting, however, comes at a cost since it must be backed by observable actions and therefore induces costly distortions of supply. Surprisingly, these latter can eliminate other distortions that arise regardless of information asymmetries in presence of endogenous technological …
Spatial Competition in Quality
We develop a model of vertical innovation in which firms incur a market entry cost and position themselves in the quality space. Once established, firms compete monopolistically, selling to consumers with heterogeneous tastes for quality. We establish the general existence and conditional uniqueness of the pricing game in such vertically differentiated markets with a potentially large number of active firms. Turning to firms’ entry decisions, exogenously growing productivities induce firms to enter the market sequentially at the top end of the quality spectrum. We spell out the conditions under which the entry problem is replicated over time so that each new entrant improves incumbent quali…
Retirement Age Across Countries: The Role of Occupations
Cross-country variation in effective retirement age is usually attributed to institutional differences that affect individuals’ incentives to retire. This paper suggests a different approach to explain this variation. Since working individuals in different occupations naturally retire at different ages, the composition of occupations within an economy matters for its average effective retirement age. Using U.S. Census data we infer the average retirement age by occupation, which we then use to predict the retirement age of 38 countries, using the occupational distribution of these countries. Our findings suggest that the differences in occupational composition explain up to 38% of the obser…
Fixed Costs Per Shipment
Exporting firms do not only decide how much of their products they ship abroad but also at which frequency. Doing so, they face a trade-off between saving on fixed costs per shipments (by shipping large amounts infrequently) and saving on storage costs (by delivering just in time with small and frequent shipments). The firm's optimal choice defines a mapping from size and frequency of shipments to fixed costs per shipment. We use a unique dataset of Swiss cross-border trade on the transaction level to analyze the size and shape of the underlying fixed costs. The data suggest that for the average Swiss exporter the fixed costs per shipment are economically important: 0.82 percent of the valu…
The Speed of Exchange Rate Pass-Through
Abstract On January 15, 2015, the Swiss National Bank discontinued its minimum exchange rate policy of 1 euro against 1.2 Swiss francs. This policy change resulted in a sharp, unanticipated, and permanent appreciation of the Swiss franc by more than 11% against the euro. We analyze the pass-through of this unusually clean exchange rate shock into import unit values at the daily frequency using Swiss transaction-level trade data. Our key findings are twofold. First, for goods invoiced in euros, the pass-through is immediate and complete. Second, for goods invoiced in Swiss francs, the pass-through is partial and exceptionally fast: beginning on the second working day after the exchange rate …
Quality pricing-to-market
We examine firm's pricing-to-market decisions in vertically differentiated industries featuring a large number of firms that compete monopolistically in the quality space. Firms sell goods of heterogeneous quality to consumers with non-homothetic preferences that differ in their income and thus their marginal willingness to pay for quality increments. We derive closed-form solutions for the pricing game under costly international trade, thus establishing existence and uniqueness. We then examine how the interaction of good quality and market demand for quality affects firms' pricing-to-market decisions. The relative price of high quality goods compared to that of low quality goods is an inc…
Trade Liberalization, Female Labor Force Participation and Economic Growth
This research argues that the interaction between international trade and female labor force participation has played a significant role in the process of development. The main concern of our study is to show how differences in per household capital stocks, via international specialization, affect household choice of female labor force participation and fertility, and how these decisions, in turn, feed back and affect the accumulation of capital. Interestingly, and in contrast to conventional wisdom, our theory suggests that specialization in female's comparative advantage sectors expands these sectors but hinders female labor force participation, while specialization in male's comparative …
Domestic Policies in Self-Enforcing Trade Agreements
If all cross-country externalities travel through the terms-of-trade, efficient trade agreements target the terms-of-trade but ignore domestic policies. This argument has been advanced by prominent studies on trade agreements. The present paper shows that its logic fails if production possibilities are intertemporally linked -- for example, under dynamic factor accumulation. In this case, past policies shape current production possibilities and thus affect defection temptations. Therefore, self-enforcing trade agreements that leave the choice of domestic policies to individual countries risk that countries abandon the zone of voluntarily cooperation while optimizing their policies. Conseque…
The Speed of Exchange Rate Pass-Through
On January 15, 2015, the Swiss National Bank terminated its minimum exchange rate policy of one euro against 1.2 Swiss francs. This policy shift resulted in a sharp, unanticipated and permanent appreciation of the Swiss franc by more than 11% against the euro. We analyze the exchange rate pass-through into import unit values of this shock at the daily frequency using Swiss transaction-level trade data. Our key findings are twofold. First, for goods invoiced in euro the pass-through is immediate and complete. This finding is consistent with no systematic nominal price adjustment in this subset of goods. Second, for goods invoiced in Swiss francs the pass-through is partial and very fast: it …
International Inflation Spillovers through Input Linkages
We document that international input-output linkages contribute substantially to synchronizing producer price inflation (PPI) across countries. Using a multicountry, industry-level data set that combines information on PPI and exchange rates with global input-output linkages, we recover the underlying cost shocks that are propagated internationally via the global input-output network, thus generating the observed dynamics of PPI. We then compare the extent to which common global factors account for the variation in actual PPI and in the underlying cost shocks. Across a range of econometric tests, input-output linkages account for half of the global component of PPI inflation.
Current account adjustment and retained earnings
First published online: 04 March 2019 This paper develops a formal strategy to calculate current accounts with retained earnings ( RE) on equity investment and analyzes their adjustment during the global financial crisis. RE are the part of companies' profits which is reinvested and not distributed to shareholders as dividends. International statistical standards treat RE on foreign direct investment and RE on portfolio investment differently: while the former enter the current and financial account, the latter do not. We show that this differential treatment strongly affects current accounts of several advanced economies, frequently referred to as financial centers, with large positions in…
Transmission of Sovereign Risk in the Euro Crisis
We assess the role of financial linkages in the transmission of sovereign risk in the Euro Crisis. Building on the narrative approach by Romer and Romer (1989), we use financial news to identify structural shocks in a vector autoregressive model of daily sovereign CDS premia for eleven European countries. To estimate how these shocks transmit across borders, we use data on cross-country bank exposures to sovereign debt. Our results indicate that cross-border financial exposures constitute important transmission channels. A 10-percent decrease in the exposure to Greek debt reduces, on average, the transmission rate of sovereign risk by 9.4 percent. Decomposing these effects, we find that exp…
On Subsidies in Trade Agreements
When terms of trade externalities are the only source of cross-border inefficiencies, trade negotiators must negotiate market access only. Based on this principle, Bagwell and Staiger (2006) argue against the WTO subsidy rules. The present paper shows that their argument fails when trade agreements are required to be self-enforceable. By affecting output, subsidies impact the self-enforcement constraints, which, in turn, determine the policies of trade agreements. Consequently, trade agreements must include subsidy rules. In realistic scenarios, banning production subsidies is efficient while negotiating market access only is inefficient. In this sense, this paper makes a strong case for th…