Trade job-market papers (2011-12)

There are plenty of trade economists on the job market this year. I’ve pulled together an incomplete list of JMPs, like last year. As usual, I focus on trade papers, thereby neglecting international finance and open-economy macro papers and trade economists working in other fields (such as urban). Please add more in the comments.

The latest NBER trade research

Plenty of trade-related material in this morning’s NBER email:

Does “Buy American” boost US manufacturing employment?

A new Chicago Booth website polls expert economists on public policy issues. It recently asked people to strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with the following statement:

Federal mandates that government purchases should be “buy American” unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, have a significant positive impact on U.S. manufacturing employment.

Here are two responses that caught my eye:

Participant Vote Confidence Comment
Daron Acemoglu Agree 6
4 years ago I would have disagreed. Recent evidence (Autor Dorn Hanson) suggests yes.Caveat: costs from higher prices & other inefficiencies
-see background information here
David Autor Disagree 4
Hard to believe this does much at all. But I’m speaking based on my prior. I’ve not seen any rigorous analysis.

The aggregate outcomes were:

IGM Buy American poll

When trade raises welfare and lowers measured GDP

This nifty note by Bajona, Gibson, Kehoe, and Ruhl points out that there may be little connection between real GDP and welfare; in fact, welfare-improving trade liberalization may lower measured real GDP. Here’s a simple example in the Heckscher-Ohlin setting:

The intuition behind the decrease in measured real GDP for the autarky to free trade scenario is simple: given factor endowments, the base-year production pattern in country i is the optimal production pattern for country i at the base year prices among all feasible production plans… Any deviation from that production pattern will lower the value of production at those prices.

WTO: WTR 2012 discussion forum

The WTO’s World Trade Report 2012 will focus on non-tariff barriers. Of course, NTBs are nothing new, but they’re more relevant in a low-tariff world. Their relative opaqueness makes them more difficult to negotiate, discipline, and study. The WTO invites submissions of short articles for their discussion forum, though I have no idea about the scope for influencing the report (due out in July).

The global trade surplus

The Economist on Exports to Mars: “The world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook… Either the current-account deficits of countries such as America are being understated or the surpluses of countries like China are being overstated, and by a rising amount… Indeed, the global “surplus” now exceeds China’s.”

Patent wars at the US ITC

Intellectual-property disputes are being adjudicated by the US International Trade Commission in the form of Section 337 disputes, which may result in US Customs banning importation of infringing products. Here’s a long list of open investigations, and here’s a blog dedicated to such disputes. Here’s a patents blog that often covers ITC disputes. I learned of Section 337 disputes from this story about HTC and Apple’s patent war.

A New York Law Journal article describes why IP battles are being waged at the US ITC forum:

The ITC has some distinct advantages for the patent plaintiff as compared to a federal district court. To start with, it is generally not necessary to establish personal jurisdiction and proper venue over each of the respondents, as the commission has in rem jurisdiction over the articles being imported. In addition, the ITC’s procedural schedules are enormously accelerated as compared to the average district court…

The 2006 Supreme Court decision in eBay v. MercExchange made it more difficult for plaintiffs in district court patent litigation to be granted an injunction. Under earlier Federal Circuit precedent, a prevailing plaintiff was virtually guaranteed an injunction, which forced an infringer to settle on the patent holder’s terms or face a complete shutdown of its business. In eBay, the Supreme Court rejected this long-standing rule and instead instructed the lower courts to make a case-by-case determination, based on “well-established principles of equity.”5 This determination is not applicable to exclusion orders in the ITC…

The combination of fast-moving schedules, reduced jurisdictional requirements, and the ready availability of injunction-like remedies make the ITC an ideal forum for the enforcement of patent rights. In addition, the domestic industry requirement, once a significant barrier for NPEs, has become easier to satisfy. As traditional manufacturing facilities abandon the United States, the ITC can still be the forum of choice for those American businesses that manufacture abroad, or even those whose sole business is to exploit patents.

Here’s another piece on the ITC forum, dubbed “outbidding the Supreme Court” (pdf), which says that “a Section 337 action before the ITC may be the most efficient, cost-effective and surefire way for a patentee to obtain the equivalent of a permanent injunction against an infringing party.”

Pakistan grants India MFN status

Pakistan has granted MFN status to India (with a list of excepted products). This accelerates liberalization between the two countries that had made some progress with the South Asian FTA (SAFTA). India granted Pakistan MFN status back in 1995. Here’s a State Bank of Pakistan research bulletin arguing for granting India MFN. Here’s a World Bank book on The Challenges and Potential of Pakistan-India Trade, which includes this paragraph:

In fact, the evidence on informal trade indicates that Pakistan has already granted something close to de facto MFN status to India. Traders exploit market arbitrage and the poor enforcement of antismuggling measures to import banned Indian products into Pakistan, hence with the change in the trade regime there could be additional revenues for the government for items that are likely to switch from the informal trade to formal trade.

How did Pakistan not grant India MFN status while being a WTO member since its inception in 1995? While MFN status has been relegated to “least favored nation” status in many circumstances, it seems that it still means something in this part of the world.

Natural disasters and global supply chains

I was on holiday in Bangkok last weekend and witnessed the city’s flooding first hand. Via Sébastien, here’s the global-supply-chain angle on the story:

The world’s biggest names in hard-drive manufacturing, for example, operate from Thailand, where suppliers and customers come together.

Until the floodwaters came, a single facility in Bang Pa-In owned by Western Digital produced one-quarter of the world’s supply of “sliders,” an integral part of hard-disk drives. Over the weekend, workers in bright orange life jackets salvaged what they could from the top floors of the complex. The ground floor resembled an aquarium and the loading bays were home to jumping fish.

“Surely one of the inevitable impacts of this is that never again will so much be concentrated in so few places,” said John Monroe, an expert on storage devices at Gartner, a technology research firm. He estimated it would take a full year for hard-drive production to return to preflood levels.

Séb discusses whether Thailand’s floods and Japan’s earthquake will cause companies to geographically diversify their supply chains.