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Three Essays On Preferential Trade Agreement And Trade Policy, Kefang Yao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of three chapters on Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) and trade policies. Increasing in numbers rapidly since 1990s, PTAs have extended their traditional focus on tariff reduction to deeper policy integration in areas such as competition policy, intellectual property rights, investment, and movement of capital. The first chapter of the dissertation uses a recently released dataset of PTA contents to quantify impacts of the horizontal depth of trade agreements on bilateral trade flows and national welfare for the period of 1980-2015. The results indicate that agreements that are deeper (covering a wider range of policy areas) contribute to …

Three Essays On International Trade Policies, Xin Yi

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies the empirical and quantitative implications of trade policies. The first chapter examines the effects of trade policies on quality specialization across cities within a country. Specifically, we complement the quality specialization literature in international trade and study how larger cities within a country produce goods with higher quality. We first establish three stylized facts on how product quality is related to agglomeration, firm productivity, and worker skills. We then rationalize these facts in a spatial equilibrium model where all the elements mentioned above are present and firms are free to choose their locations. Using firm-level data from …

International Trade, Fdi And Agency Problems, Yuting Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation comprises three papers that separately study product quality in international trade, the governance’ effect on FDI and the agency problems in firms’ exporting decisions.

The first chapter quantifies the contribution of differences in quality preferences to the differences in gains from trade across countries. The quantification demonstrates that variations in the strength of quality preferences across countries add to heterogeneities across countries in market competitiveness. If the quality channel is shut down, countries with stronger preferences for quality have larger degrees of underestimations in their losses from the trade barrier. Finally, gains from a universal rise in quality …

Effects Of Free Trade Areas In Trade Promotion: Gravity Model Approach, Mona Jit Mui Lim

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Since the early 1990s, the world has seen a proliferation of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). One of the key objectives of FTAs is to expand trade between or amongst its signatories. This study explores the intra-FTA and extra-FTA trade expansion capability of 3 types of FTA: North-North FTA (European Union (EU)-15 as a representative), North-South FTA (North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a representative) and South-South FTA (Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN ) Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) as a representative). The study made an attempt to address the spread of such FTA-led trade expansion amongst the members and …