dc.description.abstract | This dissertation is organized by three essays attempting to empirically explore issues regarding international economics. We aim to clarify the following questions: (1) Does RMB revaluation have limited effect on China’s trade surplus? (2) Does the growth of intra-industry trade pattern indeed lower the labor market variation in Taiwanese manufacturing industries? (3) What determines firm’s performance in shipping to more oversea markets, selling more products, and exporting product of higher quality?
The first essay examines the influence of the RMB variation on trades of primary, intermediate, and final goods between China and its 49 major trading partners. The empirical result shows that China’s exports are more sensitive to exchange rate than imports. Among the results, we find a counterintuitive one that an RMB appreciation will reduce China’s intermediate goods imports. This finding, along with the other one that the final goods exports, the major source of the surplus, are not sensitive to exchange rate change, are probably the main reasons why the RMB appreciation has limited effect on restraining China’s rising surplus. To deal with the trade imbalance issue between China and its partners, other than the RMB revaluation, our estimation results suggest that China needs to also speed its economic transformation from export-led to domestic-oriented model.
The second essay investigates the relationship between intra-industry trade (IIT) expansion and labor market adjustment in Taiwan. We adopt a panel dataset containing detailed employment information and utilize various measures of labor market adjustment to conduct empirical estimations. After controlling for industry-specific effects and the structure of occupational composition, the empirical results demonstrate that IIT expansion does have a smoothing effect on labor market adjustment. In addition, industries with abundant skilled workers experience lower employment adjustment costs.
The final essay explores what kinds of exporters perform better in three aspects: export to more destinations, export more varieties of products, and export products of higher quality. Using a comprehensive firm-level panel data of China’s electronics industry during 2003-2006 which is compiled from firm survey and Custom dataset, this study provides, one of the first systematically studies, the firm-level panel evidence to deal with this issue. We find that firm productivity matters not only in the two extensive margins in export destinations and varieties of products as expected, but in export quality, so far novel in the existing heterogeneous-firm trade literature. Moreover, exporters’ financing ability is found to be influential in all three aspects of performance. To deal with the sample selection as well as endogenous problems, we adopt also various datasets and variable measurement to implement empirical estimations. Most evidences support the importance of productivity on export performance. | en_US |