Essays on International Trade and Education
Open Access
- Author:
- Key, James Oliver
- Graduate Program:
- Economics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Kala Krishna, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Stephen Ross Yeaple, Committee Member
Paul L E Grieco, Committee Member
John Raymond Moran Jr., Committee Member - Keywords:
- Export dynamics
intermediate inputs - Abstract:
- In the first chapter, I develop a model in which firms vary by both labor productivity and the quality of their output, with inputs of heterogeneous quality required in the production process. The model shows how input choice is affect by a firm's exogenously determined characteristics, and how the distribution of firms responds to changes in factor prices. In doing so, this paper extends the model of Sutton (2007), by allowing heterogeneous inputs, and a stark difference between the models is seen for low wage economies. Further, this paper examines the determinants of correlation between usage of high quality inputs and productivity, finding that unlike Kugler (2012), a positive correlation need not exist for a given economy. The second chapter develops a simple model that explains some patterns in the export behavior of firms. For example, in a standard gravity model, even when controlling for all the usual variables, the rank of GDP of a country is positively and significantly related to inward trade flows, but not outward flows. We also see that firms which expand rapidly into new markets are more likely to survive than firms which expand slowly. I assume that the demand for a firm's product is positively correlated across markets, and that the uncertainty is reduced through entry into markets. As a result, the expansion behavior of a firm is driven not only by the expected profits net of entry costs, but also by the information value of an additional observation. Allowing for learning can lead to considerably different outcomes for markets that have similar fundamental properties, through both the volume of entry and the types of firms that enter. One consequence of this is that a reduction in trade barriers typically increases entry in some markets, but not others. In the final chapter, I develop a model that explains how students approach the multiple choice exams for university entrance in Turkey. I estimate this model using simulated method of moments to recover the parameters. This allows us to perform counterfactual experiments regarding the effectiveness of the system allocating students to universities. While I find substantive differences between the different gender in terms of exam behavior, these differences have very little impact on resulting allocation of students to universities.