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.

Fung, Mang Yan. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 48-55). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.4 / Chinese Abstract --- p.5 / Introduction --- p.6 / Study 1 --- p.16 / Method --- p.16 / Results --- p.21 / Discussion --- p.26 / Study 2 --- p.26 / Method --- p.28 / Results --- p.33 / Discussion --- p.41 / General Discussion --- p.42 / References --- p.48 / Appendix A --- p.56 / Appendix B --- p.58 / Appendix C --- p.63 / Appendix D --- p.65

Wong, Tak Yuen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 29-30). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Literature Review --- p.6 / Chapter 3 --- The Roommate Problem --- p.8 / Chapter 4 --- The Existence of Stable Matchings --- p.11 / Chapter 5 --- Random Paths to Stability --- p.22 / Chapter 6 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.28

Abstract not available

"January 2002" Includes bibliographical references: (p. 31-34). The primary purpose of this study is to develop a framework for identifying the primary drivers of the costs of being customer responsive. The authors' aim is to develop an understanding of the causal drivers of the costs of responsiveness as these costs are considered to be an important input to strategic and tactical decisions. In developing this framework, the paper links the characteristics of responsive manufacturing from the operations management literature with the insights from studies in the accounting literature relating to the drivers of cost. The paper attempts to model the cost impact when a firm responds to ad hoc demands involving the product customization, variation in product mix, or changes to delivery schedules. The costs emerge as a function of the type of responsiveness and the resource capacity management strategy implemented by the firm. The magnitude and dynamics of market demands and firm response, as well as the inherent flexibility of the firm's resources are seen as influencing the magnitude of the costs of responsiveness. disper

Graduation date: 2004

The acquisition and elimination of products and the resources needed to create them constitutes an important part of the business decision-making process. Activity-based costing (ABC) supports this process by providing a tool for evaluating the relative profitability of various products. It accomplishes this by allocating costs to products based on the activities, and in turn the resources demanded by those activities, required to produce them. In allocating indirect costs traditionally considered "fixed," such as equipment, administrative overhead, and support staff salaries, ABC treats all costs as variable in the long-run. However, many costs can only vary in discrete steps. For example, one usually cannot purchase a fractional piece of equipment; one chooses either to buy it or not to buy it. Also, in adding support staff, one will typically find that people demand full-time positions, so increments will come in discrete amounts. This stairstep semivariable nature of many costs runs counter to ABC's treatment of all costs as variable. In addition, different products often draw upon the same resources. This creates complex interactions, making it difficult to predict the ultimate consequences of adding or eliminating a particular product. Mixed integer programming (MIP) provides another tool for making these product/resource mix decisions. Unlike ABC, however, it can handle variables that take on integer values, and hence deal appropriately with stairstep semivariable costs. It also ensures that the decision recommended by the model will optimize profitability, given that a solution exists and the underlying assumptions hold true. In doing this, MIP automatically adjusts for all of the complex interactions that exist among the various products and resources. Using a simplified two product/two resource model, one can detail the mathematics behind ABC and MIP, and then link the two approaches through a common variable. This allows one to establish the conditions under which ABC and MIP will yield the same results, and those under which they will differ. Since MW produces an optimal solution, the fact that ABC yields a different result under specific circumstances underscores the danger of relying solely on the product margins generated by an ABC model. / Graduation date: 1998

Youth unemployment has been a persistent problem in the European Union for many years and the affected countries spend a substantial part of their budget on active labour market policies, with the aim to integrate young unemployed workers into the labour market. Employment subsidy programmes are one type of active labour market policies that have been implemented. Although important amounts of money have been spent for these programmes, little is known about the effects of participation in subsidised employment on the labour market transitions. This thesis incorporates several studies that aim to estimate the effect of a subsidised employment programme. The programme provides a reduction of the social insurance contribution for employers that hire eligible workers. All three studies provide estimates for the participation of long term unemployed school leavers. In order to evaluate whether programme participation is useful for their integration into the labour market, the effect on different duration outcomes has been investigated. A major difficulty in causal analysis with non-experimental data is that the characteristics of the group of participants may by systematically different from those of the group of non-participants. Estimates may therefore reflect both the effect of participation as well as the particular selection of participants. To control for this selection bias, multivariate mixed proportional hazard models have been applied and a large number of control variables have been incorporated. The results of this thesis show that participation in the employment subsidy programme accelerates the transitions into regular, non-subsidised employment. Moreover, the employment duration is increased, compared to a regular employment spell. Finally, the estimates show that the effect of a former participation on the duration of a subsequent unemployment spell is similar to the effect of a former regular employment spell.

This paper investigates the formation of the ownership structure and the corporate governance system of the Ukraine as a country in transition. Numerous studies consider that privatization results in the establishment of a proprietors’ motivation mechanism. On the other hand it causes ownership concentration in the hands of a few shareholders and managers. The goal of economic reform in transition and, largely, its pace, is measured by the degree to which shareholders participate in short- and long-term corporate value creation. Shareholder access to such created value depends on the ability of corporate “insiders”, especially executives and management, to claim a disproportionate share of corporate value (the “insider effect”). An econometric analysis of the correlation between privatization and macroeconomic factors studies the degree of effectiveness of economic reforming in Ukrainian regions.

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Computer and Information Science