pro competitive effects of trade reform results from a cge model of cameroon abstract how likely is trade liberalization to produce efficiency gains in the presence of imperfect competition scale economies and higher than average wages in the modern sectors all common features in developing economies these features create a potential conflict to the extent that traditional notions of comparative advantage lead us to expect that the modern sectors will be squeezed with liberalization in this paper we investigate this issue by using an applied general equilibrium model calibrated to cameroonian data under perfect competition we find that the welfare effect is a wash since the beneficial consequence of expanded imports is offset by the reduction in employment in the modern high wage sectors under imperfect competition by contrast trade liberalization produces welfare gains of the order of 1 to 2 percent of income the key is the pro competitive effect of liberalization domestic firms in the modern sectors now perceive themselves as facing a higher elasticity of demand which spurs them to increase production

offshoring and unemployment the role of search frictions labor mobility abstract in a two sector general equilibrium model with labor market search frictions we find that the wage increases and sectoral unemployment decreases upon offshoring in the presence of perfect intersectoral labor mobility if as a result labor moves to the sector with the lower or equal vacancy costs there is an unambiguous decrease in economywide unemployment with imperfect intersectoral labor mobility unemployment in the offshoring sector can rise with an unambiguous unemployment reduction in the non offshoring sector imperfect labor mobility can result in a mixed equilibrium in which only some firms offshore with unemployment in the offshoring sector rising

trade and search generated unemployment we argue that trade economists should begin to seriously consider environments in which unemployment is carefully modeled we introduce such a model derive several results and compare them to results derived in full employment models we argue that some traditional results are probably too narrow the determinants of comparative advantage and that some results do not generalize to models with unemployment the link between trade and income distribution for employed factors we also show that in some important cases results do generalize there is an extended stolper samuelson theorem that links trade to the distribution of income for searching factors and that our model allows us to address issues that traditional models cannot handle the impact of trade on unemployment and the welfare of the unemployed 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

trade liberalization and local labor market adjustment in south africa abstract despite a large literature analyzing trade liberalization in developing countries little evidence exists around its effects in sub saharan african economies characterized by high levels of baseline unemployment and weak manufacturing sectors using a local labor market approach we investigate the causal effects of tariff reforms implemented in south africa between 1994 and 2004 on labor market outcomes at the individual level more specifically we construct a district level measure of exposure to tariff reductions equal to a weighted average of industry tariffs using baseline industry shares as weights and estimate the effect of this shock on local economies we find that workers in districts facing larger tariff reductions experience a significant decline in both formal and informal employment in the tradable sector driven primarily by a decline in manufacturing employment relative to workers in districts less exposed to these reductions there is no evidence of any significant effect on wages for those who remain employed however displaced workers do not show any evidence of transitions into other sectors or migration to less affected regions rather they are more likely to become discouraged workers or exit the labor force entirely and show an increased probability of accessing government transfers

surplus country adjustment revisiting the post world war ii scarce currency clause the scarce currency clause scc in the imf s articles of agreement article vii was originally designed to establish an effective automatic mechanism to stimulate the surplus countries to adopt adjustment policies and to correct chronic imbalances the clause formally authorises countries with a chronic deficit to apply trade discrimination against a surplus country by imposing tariffs and other restrictions on its exports but the scc has never been applied and its permanence in the imf s articles of agreement appears today as a relic of the past an example of post war international cooperation this paper presents an analytical survey of the debate on the scc in the first decade of the imf exploring the contemporary opinions on the possibility that this instrument could be effectively used to correct the chronic imbalances in the post war world and to resolve the problem of dollar shortage more recently the persistence of current global trade imbalances has stimulated a renewed reflection on the automatic instrument for encouraging or compelling countries to undertake necessary adjustments the paper is focusing on recent proposals for correcting imbalances against surplus countries

trade turnover and tithing this paper examines the hypothesis that turnover affects trade preferences high turnover industries are similar to the stolper samuelson assumption of perfect factor mobility so factor of production drives trade preferences among low turnover industries as in the specific factors model net export position determines trade preferences we show that pac contribution patterns are consistent with this hypothesis in high turnover industries capital groups give significantly larger shares of their campaign contributions to free trade supporters than labor groups do among low turnover industries on the other hand exporting and import competing groups differ significantly in their financial support for free traders d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

poverty labor markets and trade liberalization in indonesia abstract we measure the effects of trade liberalization over the period of 1993 2002 on regional poverty levels in 259 indonesian districts and investigate the labor market mechanisms behind these effects the identification strategy relies on combining information on initial regional labor and product market structure with the exogenous tariff reduction schedule over four three year periods we add to the literature on local labor market effects of trade policies by distinguishing between tariffs for output markets and for intermediate inputs and finding that poverty reduced especially in districts with a greater sector exposure to input tariff liberalization among the potential channels behind this effect we show that low skilled work participation and middle skilled wages were more responsive to reductions in import tariffs on intermediate goods than to reductions in import tariffs on final outputs these results point towards increasing firm competitiveness as a driving factor behind the beneficial poverty effects

trade barriers and the collapse of world trade during the great depression 1 introduction the contraction in world trade during the first phase of the great depression stands out as the strongest adverse shock to international trade in modern history from 1929 to 1932 world import and export volume in the industrialized nations decreased about 30 however it is not well understood which factors were responsible for the collapse the factors that have been highlighted in the literature are declining demand escalating tariff and nontariff trade barriers increasing bilateral trade agreements and international exchange rate policies the importance attributed to each of these factors has often been controversial pollard 1962 p 200 for instance argues that for britain the fall in total foreign trade as a proportion of home production was a part of a secular trend and may well not have been caused by the tariff as such by contrast khan 1946 p 246 claims that within 12 to 18 months uk nominal imports of manufactures from most of europe and the united states were reduced by something like 60 as a result of the tariff similarly saint etienne 1984 p 29 argues that by the mid 1930 s international trade had become in large proportion barter trade as a result of the tariffs and nontariff barriers empirical studies have examined the effects of trade restrictions on incomes to explain the declining trade for individual countries the studies of crucini and kahn 1996 and irwin 1998 find that the tariffs were influential for the u s imports and exports in his study of nominal imports to the european countries friedman 1974 quantified the effects of trade barriers on nominal imports and ultimately income by means of dummies in periods of significant tariffs and nontariff barriers he found that trade restrictions had a significant impact on trade in a few countries however as friedman himself acknowledges the weakness of this approach is that strong and weak forms of trade barriers are restricted to impact equally on imports in the estimates coupled with the small sample problems that plagued his estimates the trade barrier dummies were unlikely to effectively have captured the effects of trade barriers on imports which explains substantial variations of the estimated effects of the tariffs and the nontariff barriers across countries the study of eichengreen and irwin 1995 is probably the most extensive analysis of trade flows in the interwar period using 561 cross sectional bilateral trade flows over three periods 1928 1935 and 1938 they estimate a gravity model of trade patterns they relate the value of bilateral flows to national income population distance contiguity trade and currency block indicators and exchange rate variability to examine the effects on trade of trade and currency blocks and exchange rate variability they observe a declining marginal propensity to import and export during the depression which they attribute to quotas and other binding trade restrictions but do not formally test their importance this paper seeks to estimate the contribution of income tariffs and nontariff barriers on world trade during the depression using panel data for 17 countries over the period from 1920 to 1938 the panel data approach enables the assessment of the influence on trade of nontariff barriers from estimates of import and export functions by using as an identifying assumption that the nontariff barriers were to some degree simultaneously imposed and relaxed across the industrialized nations during the interwar period the estimates and extensive evidence from the literature suggest that this identifying assumption is valid section 3 in section 4 the changes in world trade in the interwar period are decomposed into income effects tariff effects and nontariff barrier effects the trade effects of the tariff changes are furthermore decomposed into deflation inflation induced tariff changes and discretionary tariff induced changes

housing demand and neighborhood choice with housing vouchers abstract this paper presents a new model of household choice of neighborhood and housing consumption and uses it to predict the effects of alternative housing voucher policies on the choices of voucher recipients and their levels of wellbeing the model is estimated using household level data from housing voucher recipients in pittsburgh aggregate data on unsubsidized households and a large dataset of neighborhood characteristics including crime rates school quality racial composition and housing prices using the estimated model this study predicts effects of a variety of interesting reforms of the housing voucher program namely a more generous voucher subsidy subsidy amounts that vary with census tract housing prices instead of metropolitan area prices subsidies that are proportional to the market rent of the specific units and a requirement that voucher recipients live in a census tract where the poverty rate is less than 30

do low income housing subsidies increase the occupied housing stock abstract a necessary condition for justifying a policy such as subsidized low income housing either via tenant based rental assistance or construction of public or private projects is that it has a real effect on market outcomes in this paper we examine one aspect of the real effect of subsidized housing does it increase the housing stock if subsidized housing raises the quantity of occupied housing per capita either more people are finding housing or they are being housed less densely on the other hand if subsidized housing merely crowds out equivalent quality low income housing that otherwise would have been provided by the private sector the housing policy may have little real effect on housing consumption using both census place and msa level data from the decennial census and from the department of housing and urban development we ask whether housing markets with more subsidized housing also have more total housing after accounting for housing demand we find that government financed units raise the total number of units in a market although on average one government subsidized unit adds only one third to one half of a unit to the total housing stock there is less crowd out in more populous markets and more crowd out in places where there is less excess demand for subsidized housing as measured by the number of government financed units per eligible person tenant based housing programs such as section 8 certificates and vouchers seem to be more effective than project based programs at targeting subsidized housing units to people who otherwise would not have their own

back to which bretton woods liquidity and clearing as alternative principles for reforming international money in the face of the current crisis there is growing demand for regulation often invoked in terms of a return to bretton woods the bretton woods conference of 1944 was indeed the last explicit attempt to define a rule for international set tlements in fact post world war ii currency negotiations gave place to a confrontation between two alternative visions of the international monetary system the two plans set forth by the u s and by the u k embody two alternative principles the first aims at producing international liquidity on the basis of a reserve currency white s plan for an international stabilization fund the second aims at providing a pure means and measure for the multilateral clearing of current accounts in the form of a currency unit keynes s plan for an international clearing union the former has undoubtedly prevailed however it is questionable whether it is the most appropriate way to manage global imbalances indeed the principle eventually embodied in the bretton woods system and persisting even after its demise tends to identify money with a reserve asset making possible and even necessary the accumulation of global imbalances despite original intentions to reabsorb them on the contrary the principle that inspired the alternative plan was intended to deprive money of the character of a reserve asset thus making it the rule for international exchanges rather than an object of regulation among others this paper outlines the two principles both in historical perspective and in the perspective of future reforms particularly in relation to the recent proposal by the governor of the people s bank of china to go back to the principles of the keynes plan

the dutch disease in a developing country oil reserves in cameroon abstract noting that most of the literature on the dutch disease refers to developed countries this paper looks at the impact of an oil boom on a developing country when certain features of developing countries particularly the imperfect substitutability between domestic and imported goods are incorporated one of the standard dutch disease results can be reversed not all the traded goods sectors will contract a simulation with a computable general equilibrium model of cameroon reveals that the agricultural sector is most likely to be hurt whereas some of the manufacturing sectors will benefit this suggests possible areas for government intervention should it be warranted and may explain the differential performance between the agricultural and industrial sectors of oil exporting countries in the post 1973 period

long term earnings and employment effects of housing voucher receipt abstract using a propensity score matching approach coupled with difference in differences regression analysis we estimate the effect of housing voucher receipt on the employment and earnings of a large longitudinal sample of low income families for 6 years following voucher receipt our results indicate that voucher receipt has little effect on employment but a negative effect on earnings the negative earnings effect is largest in the years immediately following initial receipt and fades out over time in addition we find that the pattern of recipient earnings responses to voucher receipt differs substantially across demographic subgroups several robustness tests are run to support the reliability of our findings we discuss the implications of our findings for research and policy

the effects of housing assistance on labor supply evidence from a voucher lottery this study estimates the effects of means tested housing programs on labor supply using data from a randomized housing voucher wait list lottery in chicago economic theory is ambiguous about the expected sign of any labor supply response we find that among working age able bodied adults housing voucher use reduces labor force participation by around 4 percentage points 6 percent and quarterly earnings by 329 10 percent and increases temporary assistance for needy families program participation by around 2 percentage points 15 percent we find no evidence that the housing specific mechanisms hypothesized to promote work such as neighborhood quality or residential stability are important empirically jel i38 j22 r23 r38

trade liberalization and unemployment theory and evidence from india abstract a widely held view among the public is that trade liberalization increases unemployment using state and industry level unemployment and trade protection data from india we find no evidence of any unemployment increasing effect of trade reforms in fact our state level analysis reveals that urban unemployment declines with trade liberalization in states with flexible labor markets and larger employment shares in net exporter industries moreover our industry level analysis indicates that workers in industries experiencing greater reductions in trade protection were less likely to become unemployed especially in net export industries our results can be explained within a theoretical framework incorporating trade and search generated unemployment and some institutional features of the indian economy

trade liberalization and regional dynamics abstract we study the evolution of trade liberalization s effects on brazilian local labor markets regions facing larger tariff cuts experienced prolonged declines in formal sector employment and

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

international trade and unemployment theory and cross national evidence abstract we present a model of trade and search induced unemployment where trade results from heckscher ohlin h o and or ricardian comparative advantage using cross country data on trade policy unemployment and various controls and controlling for endogeneity and measurement error problems we find fairly strong and robust evidence for the ricardian prediction that unemployment and trade openness are negatively related this effect dominates the positive h o effect of trade openness on unemployment for capital abundant countries which turns negative for labor abundant countries using panel data we find an unemployment increasing short run impact of trade liberalization followed by an unemployment reducing effect leading to the new steady state

on sunk costs and trade liberalization in appled general equilibrium the authors argue that the rationalization gains often predicted by static applied general equilibrium models with imperfect competition and scale economies are artificially boosted by an unrealistic treatment of fixed costs they introduce sunk costs into one such model calibrated with real world data the authors show how this changes the oligopoly game in a way significant enough to affect both qualitatively and quantitatively the outcome of a trade liberalization exercise copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

crowd out effects of place based subsidized rental housing new evidence from the lihtc program abstract since its inception in 1987 the low income housing tax credit lihtc program has ballooned into the largest ever source of subsidized construction of low income housing in the united states accounting for one third of all recent multi family rental construction this paper examines the crowd out effects of this increasingly important source of low moderate income housing to do so we analyze the impact of lihtc construction at three different levels of geography msa county and 10 mile radius circles this allows us to employ increasingly extensive geographic fixed effects that help to difference away unobserved factors political variables are also used as instruments to further facilitate identification in all of our models iv estimates yield substantially greater crowd out than ols confirming the endogenous attraction of lihtc development to areas ripe for new construction our most robust iv estimates indicate that nearly 100 of lihtc development is offset by a reduction in the number of newly built unsubsidized rental units although the confidence band around this point estimate allows for less dramatic assessments additional estimates suggest that lihtc development has a much more moderate impact on construction of owner occupied housing but these estimates are imprecise overall while lihtc development may well affect the location of low moderate income rental housing opportunities our estimates suggest that the impact of the program on the number of newly developed rental housing units appears to be small

the gendered labor market impacts of trade liberalization evidence from brazil this paper investigates gender differences in the impact of brazil s trade liberalization on labor market outcomes to identify the causal effect of trade reforms the paper uses difference in difference estimation exploiting variation across microregions in pre liberalization industry composition the analysis finds that trade liberalization reduced male and female labor force participation and employment rates but the effects on men were significantly larger thereby tariff reductions contributed to gender convergence in labor force participation and employment rates gender differences are concentrated among the low skilled population and in the tradable sector where male and female workers are most likely to be imperfect substitutes

effects of pro growth policies on employment evidence of regional disparities the main objective of our research is to study the direct impact of pro growth economic policies on employment creation globally and regionally as evidence has countered policy makers expectation

the influence of increased foreign competition on industrial concentration and profitability abstract this paper uses the chilean manufacturing censuses of 1967 and 1979 to examine the effects of the chilean reforms in the mid 1970s on market structure and performance the reforms substantially increased the concentration in industry and substantially reduced profitability these outcomes are interpreted in the light of hypotheses about the effect of potential entrants on market structure and on the pricing behavior of incumbents next a cross sectoral simultaneous equations model of structure and performance is estimated to isolate the contribution of import and export shares to cross sectoral variations in concentration and profitability and to test for structural change between the two censuses the analysis confirms that the liberalization of trade changed the way import and export shares determined profitability and supports the import discipline hypothesis

a north south model of trade with search unemployment abstract in this paper i build a north south model of international trade economic growth and search frictional unemployment in the north growth is driven by a process of creative destruction in the north followed by imitation in the south i study the effects of intellectual property rights protection and trade liberalization on unemployment and welfare in the north intellectual property rights protection decreases unemployment and increases welfare trade liberalization increases welfare but has an ambiguous effect on unemployment it decreases unemployment if workers in the north have a high outside option and increases it if their outside option is low i provide empirical evidence in support of the last result using data for 20 oecd countries

structural reforms and labor market outcomes international panel data evidence this paper explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive set of macro level labor market outcomes including the unemployment rate the average wage index and overall and female employment levels and labor force participation rates together these outcome variables capture the overall health of the labor market and the aggregate welfare of workers yet there seems to be no other comprehensive empirical investigation in the existing literature of the impact of structural reforms at the cross country macro level on labor market outcomes other than the unemployment rate data were collected from a variety of sources including the world bank world development indicators the international monetary fund international financial statistics and the international labor organization key indicators of the labor market the resulting dataset covers up to 88 countries the majority being developing for 10 years on either side of structural reforms that took place between 1960 and 2001 after documenting the average trends across countries in the labor market outcomes up to 10 years on either side of each country s structural reform year the authors run fixed effects ordinary least squares as well as instrumental variables regressions to account for the likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labor market outcomes overall the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labor unlike related literature the paper does not find conclusive evidence on unemployment redistributive effects in favor of workers along the lines of the stolper samuelson effect may be at work

the market price of low income housing tax credits abstract the low income housing tax credit lihtc program awards a subsidy to private developers who construct and operate housing units with income targeted rent controls for at least 15 years the program allocated 6 6 billion to developers in 2006 and over 1 6 million units have been subsidized under the program since its inception in 1987 a historical literature suggests place based housing subsidies such as the lihtc program will be more expensive in providing the same level of housing support to the poor than tenant based strategies i e housing vouchers this paper uses an administrative data series of lihtc subsidized properties in california to show the program encourages developers to construct housing units that are an estimated 20 more expensive per square foot than average industry estimates it is additionally shown that due to liquidity constraints faced by lihtc primary developers in how the subsidy is allocated virtually all developers sell the tax credits at a substantial discount below their statutory value immediately after construction this price is estimated to be 0 73 per 1 of tax credit or 1 8 billion annually as compared to alternatively allocating a lump sum grant to developers

locational constraint housing counseling and successful lease up in a randomized housing voucher experiment abstract federal policy tools that could affect the concentration of poverty in metropolitan areas have been much advocated but seldom implemented and their impacts have never been properly measured this paper estimates the impact of locational constraint and intensity of counseling services on participation by low income families in the housing voucher program using data from the moving to opportunity experiment i find that constraining the voucher to low poverty neighborhoods reduces lease up by at least 14 percentage points more intense counseling services raise the lease up rate but not enough to overcome the effect of constraint

trade wages and the political economy of trade protection evidence from the colombian trade reforms abstract worker industry affiliation plays a crucial role in how trade policy affects wages in many trade models yet most research has focused on how trade policy affects wages by altering the economy wide returns to a specific worker characteristic i e skill or education rather than through worker industry affiliation this paper exploits drastic trade liberalizations in colombia in the 1980s and 1990s to investigate the relationship between protection and industry wage premiums we relate wage premiums to trade policy in an empirical framework that accounts for the political economy of trade protection accounting for time invariant political economy factors is critical when we do not control for unobserved time invariant industry characteristics we find that workers in protected sectors earn less than workers with similar observable characteristics in unprotected sectors allowing for industry fixed effects reverses the result trade protection increases relative wages this positive relationship persists when we instrument for tariff changes our results are in line with short and medium run models of trade where labor is immobile across sectors or alternatively with the existence of industry rents that are reduced by trade liberalization in the context of the current debate on the rising income inequality in developing countries our findings point to a source of disparity beyond the well documented rise in the economy wide skill premium because tariff reductions were proportionately larger in sectors employing a high fraction of less skilled workers the decrease in the wage premiums in these sectors affected such workers disproportionately

the effects of welfare to work program activities on labor market outcomes studies examining welfare to work program effectiveness present mixed and sometimes discrepant findings partly due to research design data and methodological limitations using administrative data on missouri and north carolina welfare recipients we substantially improve on past estimation approaches to identify the distinct effects of each state s welfare to work subprograms assessment job search assistance and job readiness training and more intensive programs designed to augment human capital more intensive training is associated with greater initial earnings losses but also greater long run earnings gains the negative program impacts we observe in quarters immediately following participation turn positive by the second year after participation

margins of labor market adjustment to trade abstract we use both longitudinal administrative data and cross sectional household survey data to study the margins of labor market adjustment following brazil s early 1990s trade liberalization we document how workers and regional labor markets adjust to trade induced changes in local labor demand examining various adjustment margins including earnings and wage changes interregional migration shifts between tradable and nontradable employment and shifts between formal employment informal employment and non employment our results provide insight into the regional labor market effects of trade and have important implications for policies that address informal employment and that assist trade displaced workers