NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics 2012 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Openness, volatility and the risk content of exports
2006 Meeting Papers, 2006
It has been observed that more open countries experience higher output growth volatility. This paper uses an industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade to analyze the mechanisms through which trade can affect the volatility of production. We find that sectors with higher trade are more volatile and that trade leads to increased specialization. These two forces act to increase overall volatility. We also find that sectors which are more open to trade are less correlated with the rest of the economy, an effect that acts to reduce aggregate volatility. The point estimates indicate that each of the three effects has an appreciable impact on aggregate volatility. Added together they imply that a one standard deviation change in trade openness is associated with an increase in aggregate volatility of about 15% of the mean volatility observed in the data. The results are also used to provide estimates of the welfare cost of increased volatility under several sets of assumptions. We then propose a summary measure of the riskiness of a country's pattern of export specialization, and analyze its features across countries and over time. There is a great deal of variation in countries' risk content of exports, but it does not have a simple relationship to the level of income or other country characteristics.
Export characteristics and output volatility: comparative firm-level evidence for CEE countries
Review of World Economics
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Determinants of Export Diversification Around the World: 1962-2000
The World Economy, 2011
Using a large dataset of countries during the last forty years, this paper analyzes the main determinants of export diversification. We explore the role of several factors and we use three different indicators of export diversification. We find robust evidence across specifications and indicators that trade openness induces higher specialization and does not favor export diversification. In contrast, financial development helps countries to diversify their exports. Looking at the effects of exchange rates, our results suggest a negative effect of real exchange rate overvaluation, but not significant effects of exchange rate volatility. We also find evidence that capital accumulation contributes positively to diversity exports and that increasing remoteness tend to reduce export diversification. We explore also the role of terms of trade shocks. Some of our results suggest that there is an interesting interaction between this variable and human capital. We find that improvements in terms of trade tend to concentrate exports, but this effect is lower for those countries with higher levels of human capital. This evidence suggests that countries with higher education can take advantage of positive terms of trade shocks to increase export diversification.
The roots of export diversification
2013
Countries with diversi ed export baskets take advantage of various bene ts, which are said to foster and stabilize economic growth directly and through indirect channels (e.g. reduced income volatility, positive externalities, spillover e ects). This is especially important in the context of developing economies. However, identifying the true determinants of export diversifi cation is di cult as there exists no comprehensive theoretical or empirical framework to capture all potential factors in their entirety. This paper uses Bayesian Model Averaging to uncover the true long-term roots of export diversi cation among 43 potential determinants,and thus 2 potential models. Our results suggest that only four factors are important in predicting export diversi cation levels over the long run: natural resource rents as a percentage of GDP (100 % posterior inclusion probability), primary school enrollment rates (96 %), population size (25 %), and foreign direct investment levels (17 %). Many prominent candidates turn out to be insigni cant in determining diversi cation levels. Neither policy-related variables (e.g. tari s, freedom from trade regulations or democracy) nor macroeconomic factors (such as trade openness, terms of trade or domestic investment levels) nor geographical remoteness (whether the country is an island or landlocked) play a role. Various robustness checks con rm our results.
2015
Existing wisdom links increased openness to trade to greater macroeconomic volatility, as trade induces a country to specialize, increasing its exposure to sector-speci…c shocks. Evidence suggests, however, that country-wide shocks are at least as important as sectoral shocks in shaping volatility patterns. We argue that if country-wide shocks are dominant, the impact of trade on volatility can be negative, because trade becomes a source of diversi…cation. For example, trade allows domestic goods producers to respond to shocks to the domestic supply chain by shifting sourcing abroad. Similarly, when a country has multiple trading partners, a domestic recession or a recession in any one of the trading partners translates into a smaller demand shock for its producers than when trade is more limited. Using a calibrated version of the Eaton-Kortum and Alvarez-Lucas model, we quantitatively assess the impact of lower trade barriers on volatility since the 1970s in a broad group of countries.
Exchange-Rate Risk and Exports Evidence from a Set of Transition Economies
This article investigates the hypothesis that exchange-rate risk may have an effect on exports for a set of transition countries, namely, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. To assess this effect, although a twostep estimation approach has earned an extensive empirical record in the literature, a number of studies in this context do not appear to support this approach due to a potential generated regressor issue. This dissonance in a two-step estimation procedure seems to have been somewhat resolved by a relatively new branch of empirical approach that exploits a multivariate version of generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity in-mean models. The findings suggest that the effect of exchange-rate risk seems to be detrimental in Belarus and Ukraine. However, for Russia and Kazakhstan, which are heavily dependent on crude oil exports, the effect has been found to be indeterminate.
EXCHANGE RATE VOLATILITY, AND SECTORAL EXPORTS IS THERE A RELATIONSHIP? NEW EVIDENCE FROM THE EU
… Conference On Applied …, 2011
This paper examines potential effect of exchange rate volatility for a set of eleven E.U. member countries for sectoral exports for four sectors during the period of 1973-2004. After critically reviewing the empirical literature we are able to conclude that empirical researchers often examine the hypothesis that exchange rate volatility is a major source of risk causing producers to switch their production to domestic markets which reduces the overall level of trade. The review of the literature has identified a wide range of different results with regard to the effects of exchange rate volatility and its potential effects on the level of trade. We utilize standard deviation of the moving average of the logarithm of real exchange rate as a measure of exchange rate volatility. Overall our results have estimated some sectoral effects from volatility to exports indicating a mixed relationship of volatility to trade.