Thesis (M.S.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Titus O. Awokuse, Dept. of Food & Resource Economics. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-96).

Originally presented as thesis (master's)--Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-195).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Essex, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 465-515).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Fordham University, 1990. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-134).

<p>Trade openness, market size, transparency, ease of doing business, location advantagesand low levels of corruption and country risk are the main determinants that attractForeign Direct Investment into a host country. FDI inflows in México have increasedremarkably since 1994 when the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) cameinto effect. Using multiple regression analysis in order to measure the impact of FDI onGDP; the Empirical results showed that a one percent increase in FDI leads on average toan increase of 0.08 percent in GDP which clearly reflects a positive but neither animportant nor a substantial impact of FDI on economic growth in México as it would beexpected. Time series data analysis for the period 1980-2007 has been tested for UnitRoot by applying the Dickey-Fuller (DF) test. Each time series after the first differencebecomes stationary and therefore it might be a causal relationship among the variables.However, FDI will not have a real impact on the society unless there is an effective stockof Human Capital capable of learning and absorbing the know-how to work successfullywith the technology that Multinational Corporations bring into the host country with theirinvestment. The challenge for the Mexican Government is to create structural reformssuch as the deregulation of energy and oil sector for private investment that will lead toconstantly higher flows of FDI. In the medium term this will then be reflected in thesociety in terms of poverty reduction and development of its population.</p>

No description available.

This dissertation consists of three stand-alone substantive chapters. It examines how various aspects of globalisation - openness to international trade, inflows of foreign direct investment and exposure to foreign demand shocks - affect economic performance through their impact on individual firms. The first substantive chapter presents a theoretical model of international trade with heterogeneous firms that differ not only by their productivity but also by the distortions they face. For a particular distribution of productivity and distortions, it shows that the distortions which affect the domestic and export sales in the same way and are correlated with productivity reduce the welfare gains from trade, while the distortions affecting only domestic sales tend to increase them. In addition, it documents that correlated distortions lead to a bias in an influential recent method for estimating the gains from trade. The following chapter empirically examines the link between the presence of multinational companies and the export sophistication of domestic firms in an emerging economy. The analysis is based on the matched firm and customs panel data from Romania covering the period 2005-11. The results show a positive relationship between the unit values of goods exported and imported by Romanian firms and the multinational companies' presence in downstream (input sourcing) industries. These results are consistent with quality upgrading being an additional channel through which local suppliers benefit from contacts with their multinational customers. The last chapter examines how Romanian manufacturing firms reacted to a dramatic drop in the export demand during the global trade collapse of 2008 and 2009. The exogenous effect of a fall in exports is identified by instrumenting exports with a firm-specific index of foreign demand. The results indicate that exporting firms were unable to redirect their sales to the domestic market and were forced to abruptly reduce their employment, material expenditure and investment, passing the shock to their suppliers. The results suggest that the export status of a firm may be a poor predictor of its vulnerability to a negative foreign demand shock.

No description available.

This dissertation contributes to the theoretical and empirical understandings of international transmissions of exchange rate shocks. It consists of three chapters. The first chapter extends Corsetti and Dedola (2005) and further allows for competition in retail networks. In the model, there are four types of firms interacting with each other including retailing manufacturers, non-retailing manufacturers, specialised retailers and nontradable good producers. The equilibrium depends on the interaction among these four types of firms, which leads to a dynamic and incomplete exchange rate pass through (ERPT) depending on the firms’ share of retail networks. With the standard calibration, the model can generate a high (4-5) long-run trade elasticity without conflicting with a low (0.5-1) short-run elasticity, suggesting that the dynamics of retail networks offer a potential explanation of the trade elasticity puzzle. Chapter 2 investigates the ERPT of Chinese exporters. We propose an estimator that utilises orthogonal dimensions to control for unobserved marginal costs and estimate destination specific markup adjustments to bilateral and multilateral exchange rate shocks. Our estimates suggest that the cost channel accounts for roughly 50% of conventional EPRT estimates. We offer new channels of heterogeneity in firms’ pricing behaviour and provide supporting evidence on the international pricing system. Chapter 3 aims to bridge the gap between theoretical and empirical works on ERPT. I propose a machine learning algorithm that systematically detects the determinants of ERPT. The proposed algorithm is designed to work directly with highly disaggregated firm-level customs trade databases as well as publicly available commodity trade flow datasets. Tested on the simulated data from a realistic micro-founded multi-country trade model, my algorithm is proven to have accuracies around 95% and 80% in simple and complex scenarios respectively. Applying the algorithm to China’s customs data from 2000 to 2006, I document new evidence on the nonlinear relationships among market structures, unit value volatility and ERPT.