Candidate: Xiaoxi Wang

Thesis title: Trade, Trend and Treasures.

Abstract:

This dissertation examines the trend and treasures in international trade. The first chapter investigates the explanatory power of the backbone theory of international trade. It builds a model of comparative advantage to explain China’s opening to international trade in the mid-19th century. The model departs from perfect competition and balanced trade. This paper uses the natural experiment of China’s opening and constructs a unique and nearly complete dataset containing autarky prices and national trade flows at the product level, compiled from primary archival sources recently made accessible. The paper finds China’s pattern of trade is consistent with the theory of comparative advantage. The second chapter introduces a country’s foreign exchange management as a packed policy package composed of foreign exchange reserves, short-term interest rates and long-term interest rates. The paper builds a model to describe an exporter in a country without currency mismatch, who faces a trade-off between substitutable assets denoted in local currency and the dominant foreign currency. Empirical analysis of 32 OECD countries during 2001–2020 shows that countries with more robust foreign exchange management experienced a decreased total export volume, product diversity, and trade partner intensity. In such countries, industries with better capital support gain a comparative advantage. The third chapter identifies the reliance on USD as trade treasures as a channel on trade pattern. Specifically, the paper introduces the impact of USD on the US imports, through the channel of FX reserves accumulated by the exporting countries. The dataset covers the monthly data of 61 countries across 21 industries during January 2011 to December 2019. During the US Federal Reserve’s shift of its monetary policy to Taper Tantrum, the USD inverted its weakness to a stronger upward trend. The paper estimates if the reliance on USD as trade treasures has impact during the long-term and the short-term post-Taper Tantrum time. The paper finds that countries with stronger reliance on USD as trade treasures gained a comparative advantage in industries with higher financial vulnerability in exports to the US. Such positive impact was deterred by the Taper Tantrum shock, but still hold in the long-term.

Committee:

Dr. Tibor Besedes, advisor, School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Usha Nair-Reichert, School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Karen Yan, School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Hanchao Lu, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Olga Shemyakina, School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology

Time: 11am–1pm July 11th

Location: MS Teams meeting

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