This dissertation examines the transmissions of technology and changes in the culture of statecraft by tracing the itinerary of tin from ore in mines to everyday objects. From the eighteenth century, with the expansion of the Qing empire and global trade, miners migrated from the east coast of China to the southwest frontiers of the Qing empire (1644-1912) and into Southeast Asia, bringing their mining technology with them. The tin from Southeast Asia, in return, inspired Chinese pewter artisans to invent new styles and techniques of metalworking. Furthermore, the knowledge of mining, metalworking, and trade was transferred from miners, artisans, and merchants into the knowledge system of scholar-officials, gradually changing the culture of statecraft in the Qing dynasty. This dissertation explores how imperial expansion and the intensive material exchange brought by global trade affected knowledge production and transmission, gradually changing the culture of statecraft in China. In the Qing dynasty, people used tin, the component of two common alloys, pewter and bronze, to produce objects of daily use as well as copper coins. Thus, tin was not only important to people’s everyday lives, but also to the policy-making of the Qing state. In this way, tin offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate artisans and intellectuals’ approach to technology, while it also provides a vantage point from which to examine how Qing bureaucrats managed the world, a world of human and non-human resources. My dissertation stands at the intersection of the history of science and technology, art history, intellectual history, and the history of global trade. It broadens the scope of the history of science in China by demonstrating how artisans’ practice was crucial to the production of mining treatises. It contributes to the study of science, technology, and society by showing that the transmission of and innovations in technology should be situated in the context of social, cultural, trade, and ecological networks. Finally, I argue that mid-Qing scholars’ efforts to collect practical knowledge changed the culture of governance from Confucian moral didacticism to technocratic epistemology. Qing bureaucrats, Manchu and Han alike, utilized practical knowledge from artisans and merchants in their policy-making process. By emphasizing the entanglement of technology and statecraft, my project contributes to intellectual history and enhances our understanding of the logic of bureaucracy of the Qing empire. My dissertation consists of five chapters. Each chapter uses different methodologies and covers different geographical regions. Chapter One engages with the history of science by demonstrating how scholars translated and codified miners’ vernacular knowledge of mining into mining treatises. Chapter Two examines the semi-autonomous mining community in Yunnan to illustrate that the social organization of miners, which I define as the “social technology” of mining, contributed to the formation of the capital- and labor- intensive mining industry. Chapter Three moves to the island of Bangka (in present-day Indonesia) and focuses on the transmission of mining technology from China to Southeast Asia. Through comparison, I show that the miners in Yunnan and Bangka formed similar (semi-)autonomous social organizations. I argue that it was this social technology that enabled the transmission of Chinese mining technology across geographical regions and laid the foundation for the Chinese dominance of the mining industry in Bangka. The cases of Chinese mining technology in Yunnan and Bangka challenge the modern understanding of technology by showing that technology was not just about tools and machines. Before the 1850s, both Qing bureaucrats and European colonizers considered the social organization of mining to be critical to technological progress. Chapter Four moves back to China to study the formation of Guangdong style pewter. Utilizing visual and material sources, I examine how the introduction of tin from Southeast Asia led to innovations in metallurgy, and how European silver and porcelain inspired stylistic changes. I argue that technology and innovations should be understood in the context of social, economic, material and ecological networks. The final chapter moves to Beijing and Jiangnan area to engage with the institutional history of the Qing empire. Through a case study of monetary reform undertaken in 1740, this chapter reveals that Qing bureaucrats acquired and applied practical expertise to their administrative work. Through their close interactions with artisans and merchants, Qing bureaucrats developed a distinctive vision of statecraft (jingshi). Before the late nineteenth century, the sovereignty of the Qing state was not exercised in the extraction and monopoly over natural resources. Instead, the Qing state relied on the market to acquire most of the natural resources they needed. By focusing on tin, this dissertation shows that the Qing state exercised its political power through material production and paid more attention to the management of skilled labor, capital, and the proper allocation of human and non-human resources.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / This dissertation comprises three chapters on the network structure of the economy and its macroeconomic consequences. In the first two chapters, I analyze the relationship between macroeconomic volatility of individual countries and the international trade network the countries are embedded in. In the third chapter, I study the international migration network. In the first chapter, I show a regularity that European countries occupying more central positions in the intra-Europe trade network exhibit lower macroeconomic volatility. Intuitively the trade network has a core-periphery structure and the core is more stable than the periphery. This is puzzling because the core country is also more open to shocks coming from all other countries, which increases volatility. This relationship is informative in the context of the unsettled, classic debate on whether trade openness increases or decreases country-level volatility. Rather than considering an aggregate measure like trade openness, the idea of centrality provides a more comprehensive measure of the nature and strength of trade linkages as well as the identity of the trade partners, all of which have important effects on volatility. I construct a multi-country, multi-sector model subject to idiosyncratic productivity and liquidity shocks, and fully characterize the trade network generated in equilibrium. I calibrate the model to the European Union and I show that it closely replicates the observed negative relationship. Next, I extend the theory presented to incorporate a general network structure and its effects on volatility. From an empirical perspective, I construct an instrument based on geographic distance to establish the finding. From a theoretical perspective, I consider the possibilities of missing linkages and stochastic weights in the trade networks. The third chapter studies the European immobility puzzle. A theory of cross-country migration is devised in the form of labor mobility based on regional and sectoral productivity shocks in a multi-country, multi-sector setting. Differences across countries in socio-cultural and institutional factors induce a friction on such labor reallocation process. The model explains interstate migration network within the U. S. (frictionless benchmark) well. When applied to Europe, the model predicts a sizeable missing mass of migrants. Our estimates show this to be due to socio-cultural barriers.

Because trade is seen as welfare improving for society, governments have long employed their policy-making powers to increase trade levels. In recent years, no strategy has been more employed by policy makers than free trade agreements. As free trade agreements become more popular, world tariff levels rapidly approach zero. Given this, policy makers must look to other methods to encourage trade. I examine how non-tariff trade barriers impact international trade levels. By better understanding these trade barriers, policy makers will be able to make more informed decisions. To better understand non-tariff trade barriers, I begin with well-known impediments to trade, including the border effect, transportation costs, and the trade creation and trade diversion effects of regional trade agreements. I then demonstrate and examine heterogeneity in these trade costs. In Chapter II I examine the often-studied border effect, the notion that regions trade more intra-nationally than internationally. I demonstrate that smaller regions are less attractive to foreign trading partners than their larger counterparts. Fixed costs of crossing an international border, as well as more effective marketing methods, mean economically larger U.S. states or Canadian provinces see a smaller border effect. In Chapter III I look at how transportation costs incurred within the exporting country impact trade levels. Using a unique instrumental variable strategy, I show that the cost of getting a good to a port is a significant hindrance to trade. Finally, in Chapter IV I show that the benefits of joining the European Union are heterogeneous across countries. This means that while the E.U. may be beneficial on average, it may not be beneficial for individual countries.

Economic intuition suggests that real currency depreciation should lead to long run improvement in a country's trade balance. The short run implications of real depreciation are relatively unknown. The current literature suggests that the short run relationship between trade and real exchange rates is country-specific. This literature has not explored if product and trading partner characteristics play a role in this relationship. This dissertation explores how heterogeneity in trade influences the responsiveness of trade to real exchange rate fluctuations. To my knowledge, this is the first set of papers exploring this heterogeneity. The first paper of this dissertation explores heterogeneity with U.S. commodity-level trade data. Trade responsiveness to real fluctuations varies across product and trading partner characteristics. I find no evidence of long run gains in trade following real depreciation, suggesting that currency manipulation policies meant to improve a country’s trade balance may have no effect on trade in the long run. Prices in international trade contracts with U.S. firms are largely invoiced in U.S. dollars. However, the current literature suggests that the currency in which these prices are set should affect the relationship between trade and real exchange rates in the short run. The second paper of this dissertation explores the implications of currency invoicing patterns using Japanese commodity-level trade data. I find that the response of trade to real fluctuations may differ in the short and long run across product and trading partner characteristics. I also find that the response of trade in the long run may be correlated with comparative advantage. The third paper of this dissertation explores the implications of foreign exchange market liberalization in Japan following the Asian Financial Crisis. I find that liberalization, coupled with financial market reforms, resulted in trade being less responsive to real fluctuations. I also find no evidence of long run trade balance improvement before or after liberalization and that the reform may have eliminated temporary short run gains, suggesting that currency manipulation policies may have no effect on short or long run trade.

International tourism, as an invisible export product, has been growing considerably with its many economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts on both tourist importing and exporting countries in the world. The unique and multifaceted characteristics of this product make it necessary for the countries concerned to take a comprehensive approach to its production, control and dynamic marketing in harmony with the overall socio-economic development of the country. This study describes and analyses the tourism product and its overall impacts and provides a conceptual, corporate planning model in which not only developing countries but all can find a background. The study goes through four main stages of which the first is the theo-rectical analysis of the tourism industry, its conceptual background, its growth, factors affecting the growth and its overall effects, particularly on developing countries. It then proceeds to the second part with the planning and control of tourism development, and to the marketing of the tourism product. It evaluates the developments in these fields on a comparative basis. The third part of the study begins with an overall picture of the Turkish economy in detail, together with social and political considerations, identifying problems of and prospects for development. It then goes on to provide a thorough examination of both the demand for, and supply of the Turkish tourism product, illustrating how the theoretical model set in the first and second parts could be used in analysing the data. Effectiveness of Turkey's tourism policies is measured, where possible on a comparative basis, identifying main problems and possible solutions. The conclusions of the detailed analysis are given in the fourth and final part of the study in order that policies for a healthy development of international tourism in developing countries and in Turkey particularly, may be formulated and hence followed.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University. / Trade between the United States and Russia has never been given much attention by American historians, particularly by those American historians specializing in studies of our early national period. Therefore, he who would do research on early Russo-American commerce must pore over the manuscript consular and ministerial reports of the American State Department archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society microfilms of the diary and letters of John Quincy Adams, and the manuscript log, letter and account books of the Peabody Museum and Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts. In the early national period of the United States no field of economic endeavor except agriculture was of greater importance to our young republic than our overseas trade. The merchant marine was one of the most important tools in the creation of American economic viability and in the reinforcement of the political independence so recently won. Our merchant marine a.n:i our navy could not have operated without Russian imports: iron, sailcloth and -most important of all - hemp and hemp cordage. In the age of sail, hemp was as critically important as is oil today, for hemp cordage was the ligaments and nerves of the sailing ship. Some hemp was raised in the United States, but of such poor quality that when exposed to brine or to salt spray it quickly deteriorated. Most hemp used on American ships was grown in Russia. Russo-American trade was also important in the history of Russia and Europe as a whole. Russia was an ally of Napoleon when he created his Continental System by forbidding his empire and allies to trade with the British. However, Russia's best market was Britain and Britain's best source of essential naval stores was Russia. At the same time, Americans were discovering that the economic warfare between France and Britain was making the ports of all of Europe directly or nearly directly under Napoleon's control very dangerous for American shipping. Even the usually peaceful Danes, for instance, seized several hundred American merchantmen between 1807 and the outbreak of the War of 1812. It was inevitable that Russia, the continental European nation farthest from Napoleon's center of power, would become one of our most important trading partners. In 1811, for example, one tenth of all America's exports went to Russia. It was also inevitable that many Americans would engage in smuggling goods to and from Russia fer the British. And it was inevitable that Britons would disguise their own merchantmen with American flags and papers, and continue direct trade with Russia under false colors. Thus it was that from 1808 through 1812 the foreign flag most commonly seen in Russia's Baltic and White Sea ports was the Stars and Stripes. In the summer of 1811, for instance, a hundred vessels flying the American nag lay in Kronstadt harbor at one time. Napoleon sent demand after demand to Tsar Alexander I to halt all trade with American vessels. All Americans, the Corsican claimed, were either British or sailing on British account. From 1809 through the winter of 1812 Napoleon's ambassadors to Russia, Caulaincourt and Lauriston, fought America's minister to Russia, John Quincy Adams, for Alexander's favor. Adams won, because Alexander knew that the bulk of Russia's foreign trade was now being carried in American bottoms. To sever trade relations with the United States would have had a disastrous effect on Russia's already staggering economy. Probably Russia's lax enforcement of the Continental System against shipping flying the American colors was as important as any other single factor in convincing Napoleon that he must invade Russia, and therefore in bringing the French Einpire to wreck upon the white reefs of the Russian winter of 1812.

Chapter 1, “The Impact of Trade Shocks on Local Labor Markets” estimates the effects of increased trade with China on Brazilian local labor markets using longitudinal individual data on the universe of Brazilian formal sector workers. First, I use reduced-form estimation strategies commonly found in the literature to compare my results to previous findings. I show that my results at the regional level mirror those found in prior studies based on cross-sectional data. I argue that these estimates are potentially biased as they do not take into account the flows of factors and goods between regions. I complement the reduced-form approach with a structural analysis based on the model by Caliendo et al. (2015) in order to endogenize such flows and to study welfare effects. I find that in the absence of the Chinese shock the Brazilian Commodities sector would have shrunk while Manufacturing and Services would have expanded. Relative to this baseline, the employment effect of increased trade with China at the national level was a slower reduction in the share of the Commodities sector and a slower growth in the Manufacturing subsectors that were relatively more exposed to Chinese import competition. My analysis suggests that while the average Brazilian worker benefitted from this shock, the welfare effects were very heterogeneous across sectors and across locations. I find that this heterogeneity is vastly underestimated if instead of using data at the level of metropolitan areas I use data aggregated by States and I explain why the choice of spatial units affects these results. Chapter 2, “Agglomeration: A Long-Run Panel Data Approach” studies the sources of agglomeration economies in cities. We begin by incorporating within and cross-industry spillovers into a dynamic spatial equilibrium model in order to obtain a panel data estimating equation. This gives us a framework for measuring a rich set of agglomeration forces while controlling for a variety of potentially confounding effects. We apply this estimation strategy to detailed new data describing the industry composition of 31 English cities from 1851-1911. Our results show that industries grew more rapidly in cities where they had more local suppliers or other occupationally-similar industries. We find no evidence of dynamic within-industry effects, i.e., industries generally did not grow more rapidly in cities in which they were already large. Once we control for these agglomeration forces, we find evidence of strong dynamic congestion forces related to city size. We also show how to construct estimates of the combined strength of the many agglomeration forces in our model. These results suggest a lower bound estimate of the strength of agglomeration forces equivalent to a city-size divergence rate of 1.6-2.3% per decade. Chapter 3, “Gravity estimation with unobserved bilateral flow data” adapts the methodology by Miscio & Soares (2016) to predict domestic trade flows by sector between Brazilian metropolitan areas. This methodology, initially developed to infer commuting flows from aggregate data on population by place of residence and by place of work, relies on moment conditions derived from a general gravity equation and it is consistent with a large class of trade models. I show that it can also be applied to infer domestic trade flows by sector. Before using the methodology on Brazilian data, where we only observe flows between States, I test it on US data from the Commodity Flow Survey, where we observe both flows between States and between finer spatial units similar to metropolitan areas. I argue that the predicted bilateral flows obtained from this methodology are highly correlated with actual flows. Alternative approaches found in the recent literature differ from the one presented here in that they require stronger assumptions and deliver weaker results. In particular, the other approaches only describe aggregate flows (i.e. summing across all sectors) and cannot be used to predict sectoral flows.

This dissertation consists of three essays that sit at the intersection of international trade, political economy and the economics of innovation. It analyzes from a critical perspective the relationship between organized interest groups and international agreements on trade and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection and offers new theoretical insights, which it then supports empirically. My first essay calls into question the logic of the standard Grossman-Helpman/Bagwell-Staiger model of trade agreements, according to which governments enter international treaties to prevent terms-of-trade manipulation and special interest politics has a trivial role. Despite its immense popularity, it remains inconsistent with observed trade policy and with the practitioners' understanding of trade treaties. By assuming that subsidies have additional political cost beyond their monetary cost, I show how international agreements result in the reduction of political protectionism through the crucial role of exporting lobbies in the negotiations process. At the same time, the model resolves three prominent puzzles in the literature: the terms-of-trade puzzle, the anti-trade bias puzzle and the inefficient redistribution puzzle. Finally I find empirical support for the model and my key assumption using data on US agricultural trade policy. In the second essay I propose a model that considers the effect of firm lobbying for IPR protection in an international setting in innovation-driven economies. In particular, I compare the IPR protection level and global social welfare between the case when countries set their IPR policies non-cooperatively and when they enter an international treaty, such as the TRIPS, TPP and TTIP. I find that lobbying necessarily leads to inefficient international agreements resulting in too much IPR protection and may even be welfare-reducing relative to no cooperation. I also show that international lobbying and high concentration of capital can further exacerbate this outcome. The model generates predictions consistent with patterns I find in the data on US firms' lobbying expenditures and the value of their international patent portfolios. Finally, the third essay provides a critique of a popular structural patent valuation methodology that utilizes the stock market response to news about patent grants, first introduced by Kogan et al. (2012). Using their methodology (refined and improved in terms of the theoretical derivation), I perform a placebo estimation of US patent values and compare the results with the true patent value estimates as per Kogan et al's paper. I find strong evidence that the "true" patent value estimates are not driven by patent news announcements, but rather are an artifact of the estimation methodology itself and as such cannot be used for comparisons across different patent-holding firms and grant years. I further corroborate the external validity of this critique by applying the same method to a novel database of Chinese patents and finding that the same conclusion holds.

How important are the distributional effects of international trade? This has been one of the most central questions pursued by international economists, particularly because much of the public opposition towards increased openness is due to the belief that welfare changes are unevenly distributed. In this dissertation, I rely on counterfactual analysis and natural experiments to study topics of international trade, welfare and inequality in the context of both developing and developed economies. In particular, I combine theoretical modeling and empirical analysis to examine the effects of international trade on (1) real wages of individuals within and across countries; (2) within-sector wage dispersion caused by heterogeneous responses of firms with different productivity levels to cheaper imported inputs. In each of the three chapters, I contribute to the existing literature by relaxing simplifying assumptions that have proved to be inconsistent with data and exploring new mechanisms that link international trade to inequality. Chapter 1, “Trade and Real Wages with Demand and Productivity Heterogeneity,” presents a general equilibrium model that incorporates the effects of trade liberalization on both an individual’s nominal wage and consumer price index. A vast majority of the literature focuses on the income channel, which is its effect on the distribution of nominal wages across workers. A small number of studies consider the expenditure channel, which is its differential impact on consumer price indices. It is well known that the consumption baskets of high-income and low-income consumers look very different. To our knowledge, there are only three case studies that have looked at these two channels jointly for individual countries, Argentina, Mexico and India. We provide a unified framework incorporating both channels by allowing for non-homothetic preferences and worker heterogeneity across jobs. In spite of its many dimensions of heterogeneity at the individual level, the model remains tractable enough that allows us to estimate its key parameters and perform counterfactuals. Chapter 2, “Trade and Real Wage Inequality: Cross-Country Evidence,” addresses the following question: what is the impact of trade liberalization on the distribution of real wages in a large cross-section of countries? Trade liberalization affects real-wage inequality through two channels: the distribution of nominal wages across workers and, if the rich and the poor consume different bundles of goods, the distribution of price indices across consumers. Prior work has focused mostly on one or the other of these channels, but no paper has studied both jointly for a large set of countries. Based on the theoretical framework in Chapter 1, I measure the distributional effects of trade liberalization incorporating both channels for a sample of 40 countries. More specifically, I parametrize the model using sector-level trade and production data. Because skill-intensive goods are also high-income elastic in the data, I find an intuitive, previously unexplored, and strong interaction between the two channels. According to my counterfactual analysis, trade cost reductions generate dramatically different results for both nominal wage inequality and price index inequality than what previous research has obtained by focusing on either channel alone. I find that trade cost reductions decrease the relative nominal wage of the poor and the relative price index for the poor in all countries. On net, real-wage inequality falls everywhere. Chapter 3, “Imported Inputs and Within-Sector Wage Dispersion,” proposes a new mechanism through which trade liberalization affects income inequality within a country: the use of imported inputs. Intuitively, a firm with higher initial productivity is better at using higher quality foreign inputs. This justifies paying the fixed costs for a larger set of imported inputs when input tariff liberalization decreases their relative price. The firm becomes more import intensive, which enhances its productivity advantage. As a result, the firm hires higher quality workers, produces higher quality products and pays higher wages to its workers, increasing within-sector wage dispersion. We find that both the mean and the dispersion of the distribution of firm productivity, markup and size went up during a period when China reduced its tariffs on imported inputs. More importantly, these results still hold when we consider the subset of firms that survived throughout the sample period, from 1998 to 2007. In addition, we develop a partial-equilibrium, heterogeneous-firm model with endogenous imported inputs and labor quality choice that is consistent with these observations. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that supports the model’s prediction that the differential change in the import intensity of firms with different productivity levels explains these patterns.

acase@tulane.edu / The arrival of World War II triggered significant disturbances in global trade, forcing U.S. importers and exporters to find alternative sources of business to make up for lost markets in Europe and Asia. This study traces the efforts of business and civic leaders in Houston, New Orleans, and Miami to increase trade, transportation, and tourism income from Latin America and the Caribbean by adopting Pan Americanism as a business strategy. Businessmen and local civic officials believed they could combine new trade promotion institutions with a carefully cultivated Pan American civic identity to establish their cities as “gateways” to the Americas. This framework became a key component of the regional competition between Houston, New Orleans, and Miami in the late 1940s and 1950s. The implications for these Pan American business strategies stretched far beyond the Gulf South, however. Business and civic leaders often described their activities within the context of U.S.-Latin American diplomacy, connecting trade promotion and international relationship-building with broader national objectives of hemispheric cooperation and anticommunism. This connection attracted the interest of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, whose officials hoped to leverage the influence of private enterprise to achieve Latin American economic development and discourage anti-foreign investment policies without significant government funding. Both local business communities and federal agencies used this harmony of vision to their advantage. Washington found ways to co-opt the Pan American business strategies of the Gulf South while local civic and business leaders drew legitimacy and sometimes even financial support for their programs from the federal government. Ultimately, for a variety of reasons, Pan Americanism eventually became unprofitable as a business strategy, and most of the institutions Houston, New Orleans, and Miami had established either failed or changed considerably by the 1970s. The lasting legacy of this phenomenon, however, lies in the frameworks these cities helped establish for reimagining the port city as a diplomatic space and business communities as diplomatic agents. / 1 / Joshua Goodman