Essays on international trade and macroeconomic dynamics
By: by Keyu Jin
Published: 2009
Language: eng
Number of pages: 132
Description: This thesis consists of three essays presenting new perspectives on international capital flows and asset prices. The first perspective, a trade perspective, rests on the observation that commodity trade and financial capital flows have typically been analyzed separately in the theoretical literature while in reality they are deeply intertwined. The first two essays demonstrate how the endogenous evolution of trade patterns can dramatically alter macroeconomic dynamics. The second perspective, a portfolio perspective, is based on the view that the explosion in international financial asset trade has made the structure of national portfolios important in analyzing external adjustments. The third essay derives a generalized portfolio framework of international capital flows, and clarifies past misconceptions of the quantitatively dominant driving force of current account dynamics. The first chapter shows how an integrated framework of trade and financial capital flows can shed light on widely-debated issues of global imbalances and asset prices. When commodity trade and financial capital flows can interact, a new force driving international capital flows emerges: capital tends to flow towards countries that become more specialized in capital-intensive industries (the composition effect). This force competes with the neoclassical "convergence" force in response to shocks such as globalization, country-specific labor force or labor productivity shocks. If the composition effect dominates, capital flows away from the country hit by the positive shock ("a flow reversal"), and asset prices rise globally rather than locally. One implication is that the rich countries' current account deficits may be a consequence of their shifting towards capital-intensive industries.

The second essay incorporates endogenous factor-proportions trade into an inter-national business cycle setting and demonstrates that the integrated framework substantially improves upon past, standard models that assume exogenously-determined structures of trade in matching key moments of the international business cycle data, resolving the "anomalies" that arise in the standard framework. An additional implication is that the type of trade rather than overall trade between countries matters: countries trading goods that are similar in factor intensity (intraindustry trade) tend to exhibit negative investment comovement while countries whose trade is characterized by more disparate factor content tend to exhibit greater investment comovement. The third essay, on a portfolio perspective of international capital flows, analyzes a useful accounting framework that breaks down the current account to two components: a portfolio reallocation effect and a portfolio growth effect. Past empirical evidence strongly supporting the growth-effect as the main driver of current account dynamics is misconceived. Its remarkable empirical success is driven by the dominance of the cross-sectional variation, which, under conditions met by the data, is generated by an accounting approximation. Finally, this chapter shows that the portfolio reallocation effect is the quantitatively dominant driving force of current account dynamics in the past data.
Notes: "May 2009."

Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of Economics)--Harvard University, 2009.

Includes bibliographical references.