Essays In International Trade And Industrial Organization

Author : Scott Orr
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (133 download)

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Download or read book Essays on International Trade and Industrial Organization written by Scott Orr and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contains three papers examining topics related to international trade and industrial organization. In Chapter 1, I develop a flexible methodology that uses profit maximization conditions to solve for unobserved input allocations, TFP, and quality across product lines in multi-product plants. I apply this methodology to a panel of plants manufacturing machinery in India from 2000-2007. I find that there is substantial variation in both TFP and quality across product lines within a given plant, and that quality and quantity based TFP (TFPQ) are negatively correlated. Finally, I find that increases in Chinese import competition led plants to reallocate their inputs towards higher quality products and away from their high TFPQ products, thereby generating within plant quality improvements, rather than productivity gains. In Chapter 2, which is based on joint work with Daniel Ershov and Jean-William Lalibert\'{e}, we use consumer level data from Nielsen to look at two products with natural demand complementarities and a history of regulatory activity - potato chips and carbonated soda pop. We estimate a discrete choice model that allows for demand complementarity across pop and chips, using a novel estimator that leverages information on bundle specific purchases from consumer micro data, as well as aggregate scanner data. We then simulate a number of anti-trust counterfactuals in the chips and carbonated soda market. Once demand complementarity is taken into account, a merger between the chips and soda producer PepsiCo/Frito-Lay and the soda producer Dr. Pepper will reduce chip prices. Soda prices will either increase or fall, depending on the market. By contrast, the standard discrete choice model predicts that soda prices would always increase following the merger. In Chapter 3, which is based on joint work with Daniel Trefler and Miaojie Yu, we review some recent methods for estimating productivity. We apply these methods to Chinese manufacturing data for 2000-2006, with the goal of determining the strengths and pitfalls of the various approaches. We find that irrespective of the approach used to estimate productivity, gross output production functions generate more sensible estimates than value added production functions.